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

— William Barrett Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958)

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Poetry

More quotes by William Barrett

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)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Barrett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.