To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.
William BarrettThe bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life.
William BarrettIt is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.
William BarrettFrom 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.
William Barrett