William Barrett Quotes

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.

We exist within the question of God.

Modern Existentialism... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.

Much like tobacco companies want to keep smokers dependent on their deadly product, the oil industry wants to keep California dependent on oil – an expensive, dirty and limited resource that damages health.

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.