philosopher, pedagogue, writer, university teacher, sociologist, mathematician, literary critic, opinion journalist, politician, poet, translator, essayist
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1883 – 1955
Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.
Life is fired at us point blank.
I am I and my circumstance, and if I don't save it I don't save myself.
When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?
Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems. leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. … Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop.
That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them
The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?
The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. … An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility
The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.
Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.
Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.
Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which … can be called “public” or “popular” opinion.
Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
Every living creature is happy when he fulfills his destiny, that is, when he realizes himself, when he is being that which in truth he is. For this reason, Schlegel, inverting the relationship between pleasure and destiny, said, “We have a genius for what we like.” Genius, man’s superlative gift for doing something, always carries a look of supreme pleasure.
I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.
I think that the philosopher must, for his own purposes, carry methodological strictness to an extreme when he is investigating and pursuing his truths, but when he is ready to enunciate them and give them out, he ought to avoid the cynical skill with which some scientists, like a Hercules at the fair, amuse themselves by displaying to the public the biceps of their technique.
For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
I am I plus my circumstances.
Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
We cannot put off living until we are ready.
Law is born from despair of human nature.
Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.