existential understanding Quotes

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

Through Self-realization man becomes aware of true values as to his place in the divine plan and his relation to the past, present, and future of mankind.

Eternity is not the hereafter...this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere.

Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.

The world of immediate experience the world in which we find ourselves living must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

It is not all of life to live, nor yet all of death to die. For life and death are one, and only those who will consider the experience as one may come to understand or comprehend what peace indeed means.

You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.

Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order.

Life is short for those who are truly able to understand that one day the entire world will come to a complete end. Not everyone is capable of that. Not everyone has the ability to comprehend what going away for all eternity really implies. There are too many distractions, hour by hour, minute by minute, to hinder such an understanding.

To put it boldly, it is the attempt at a posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.

That I am not my experiences is very obvious. I am the one who is having those experiences. Spirituality has nothing to do with experience.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

...knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.

Modern science has its value in terms of utility, but it cannot open up existence to human experience.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

Everything is reduced to what's physical in the end, because it's the filth inside people's minds that creates all the evil. What is a body, anyway? I suppose you've got to abuse your body to understand it. If you're not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment's pleasure, I don't believe that you've actually lived.

Today it is not alive. What, then, is this experience of humanism? With the above survey I have tried to show you that the experience of humanism is that — as Terence expressed it — “Nothing human is alien to me”; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and I am the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don't destroy the human race, will live hundred thousand years from now.

Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are.

To go through this life and see it through - what it really is - and not be insane or addicted, is a minor miracle for anyone.

Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.

Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.

For both art and the historical sciences are ways of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence is immediately brought into play.

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.