Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Zygmunt Bauman

Quote by Zygmunt Bauman

“The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.”

Quote by Zygmunt Bauman

Author

Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a Polish-British sociologist and philosopher, widely regarded as one of the most influential social thinkers of the 20th century. He taught sociology at the University of Leeds and was known for his concept of "liquid modernity," which describes the shift from solid, stable social structures to fluid, uncertain conditions. His major works include "Modernity and the Holocaust," "Liquid Modernity," and "Liquid Love." Bauman's analysis of consumer capitalism, social inequality, and the relationship between modernity and genocide has profoundly shaped contemporary sociological thought. more

You May Also Like

“For one to be free there must be at least two. Freedom signifies a social relation, an asymmetry of social conditions: essentially it implies social difference--it presumes and implies the presence of social division. Some can be free only in so far as there is a form of dependence they can aspire to escape.”

“Our vulnerability [to ressentiment] is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone "has the right" to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.”

“When the blessed Spirit, that bloweth where it listeth, visits you and stirs the plumage of the soul, seek no cowardly shelter from it, but fling yourself upon it, and, though its sweep be awful, you shall be sustained. Only do this, do all, not in presumptuous daring, but in divine submission; in dependence, not on any strength that can be spent, but on the ever-living stay of all that trust in Him.”

“To Him let us but cleave in all ouv strife; and the Tempte1 will flee; the wilderness will be desolate no more; angels will come and minister unto us; and when we pass from them to the ministry of life, be it to the glory of a transfiguration, the sorrows of a Gethsemane, or the sacrifice of the cross, the tran- quilizing peace of God will never be far from us.”