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Quotes from Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy — William Barrett

1913–1992 United States

← All quotes by William Barrett

24 quotes

The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be an Existentialist.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

A recognition of limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents power from dizzy collapse.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Journalism has become a great god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

The anguish of loss may be redeemed, but can never be mediated.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than the savants of St Petersburg in their learning.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Poets are witnesses to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into thought.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while to regroup his forces. The man really does write too much.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of modern art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative.

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William Barrett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.