14 quotes
The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test.
The Philsophy of Existence (1948)
It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
No philosopher would be willing to accept the idea of philosophy as a way of escape, but might there not be a question of the philosopher being in duty bound to refuse to accept a world, like our real world here, of disorder and crime where the values of the mind and spirit can no longer find a home?
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
Being is - or should be - necessary.
The Philsophy of Existence (1948)
speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride.
The Philsophy of Existence (1948)
There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope.
The Philsophy of Existence (1948)
The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas an images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time.
Man Against Mass Society (1952)
I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical.
The Philsophy of Existence (1948)