Quotessence
Home / Quotes / A Quotes

A Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All A Quotes

“A non-religious man today ignores what he considers sacred but, in the structure of his consciousness, could not be without the ideas of being and the meaningful. He may consider these purely human aspects of the structure of consciousness. What we see today is that man considers himself to have nothing sacred, no god; but still his life has a meaning, because without it he could not live; he would be in chaos. He looks for being and does not immediately call it being, but meaning or goals; he behaves in his existence as if he had a kind of center. He is going somewhere, he is doing something. We do not see anything religious here; we just see man behaving as a human being. But as a historian of religion, I am not certain that there is nothing religious here… I cannot consider exclusively what that man tells me when he consciously says, ‘I don’t believe in God; I believe in history,’ and so on. For example, I do not think that Jean-Paul Sartre gives all of himself in his philosophy, because I know that Sartre sleeps and dreams and likes music and goes to the theater. And in the theater he gets into a temporal dimension in which he no longer lives his ‘moment historique.’ There he lives in quite another dimension. We live in another dimension when we listen to Bach. Another experience of time is given in drama. We spend two hours at a play, and yet the time represented in the play occupies years and years. We also dream. This is the complete man. I cannot cut this complete man off and believe someone immediately when he consciously says that he is not a religious man. I think that unconsciously, this man still behaves as the ‘homo religiosus,’ has some source of value and meaning, some images, is nourished by his unconscious, by the imaginary universe of the poems he reads, of the plays he sees; he still lives in different universes. I cannot limit his universe to that purely self-conscious, rationalistic universe which he pretends to inhabit, since that universe is not human.”

“A norma d'Universo le grandi stragi non son neppure un brivido, sebbene l'Universo della umana memoria protesti. E s'erano affidati alla carta, al legno, alle pietre, queste materie più salde di un corpo umano, perché l'umanità civile continuasse. Ma ecco scritture, intagli, colori, violentemente sbaragliati e inceneriti, mentre l'ingegnoso che li concepì è ridotto un meschino senza volto, scacciato dal sasso dove univa i piedi tremando, all'orlo di una voragine.”

“A normal human life consists of 500 million breaths for three billion heartbeats. That sounds a lot, but it’s not enough. You are searching: for a moment that feels better than the last. For a spark that lights a fire in your heart. For things that make you want to keep breathing: those your heart will want to keep beating for. For as long as you are living you are looking for them. Constantly and continuously, regardless of what you find. And here there’s us who we have become eternal. We will have to keep searching for the unbearable rest of eternity: aim- und pointlessly, since everything there is to find is, at some stage, found. You get tired. So tired of searching, so tired of life. There is nothing in the world that a heart wants to keep beating for forever: no single spark that can outlast eternity and no moment that can feel good enough to make up for the countless ones which will forever be in front of us.”

“A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?”