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Finitude Quotes

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Finitude Quotes

“The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise, that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask the question, ‘Why are we?’ But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth? Is evil absolute and ultimate? The river has its boundaries, its bank, but is a river all banks or are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion? The towing rope binds a boat, but is bondage its meaning? Does it not at the same time draw the boat forward? The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement which is towards perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that man has in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect. Just as a man who has an ear for music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only listening to a succession of notes. Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness. Finitude is not contradictory to the infinity. They are but completeness manifested in parts; infinity revealed within bounds.”

GodSufferingEvilCreationPerfectionInfiniteImperfectionInfinityFinitude
Book:Sadhana
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“To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lifes matter and why we care. (49)”

CareVulnerabilityMeaning Of LifeMortalityFinitude
Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?”

SelfInfinityIncompletenessFinitude
Book:Meditations on First Philosophy
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“My freedom therefore requires that I can ask myself what I *should* do with my time. Even when I am utterly absorbed in what I do, what I say, and what I love, the possibility of this question must be alive in me. Being engaged in my activities, I must run the risk of being bored--otherwise my engagement would be a matter of compulsive necessity. Being devoted to what I love, I must run the risk of losing it or giving it up--otherwise there would be nothing at stake in maintaining and actively relating to what I love. Most fundamentally, I must live in relation to my irrevocable death--otherwise I would believe that my time is infinite and there would be no urgency in dedicating my life to anything. The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die--that our lifetime is indefinite but finite--can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities. This is why all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of *unfreedom.*”

FreedomPurpose Of LifeFinitude
Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be. (44)”

LoveLossLiving OnFinitude
Book:This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
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“Absolute, without the world or universe, is finite. When the Being is equal to the Nonbeing, the Absolute becomes the same—the Nonbeing. The World-Universe is possible only through the active relationship between the Being and the Nonbeing. The absolute potential of the Being and the Nonbeing is initiated and becomes the source of space and time (spacetime), as we understand it, and is the source of infinity as a never-ending potential. Absolute finiteness is infinity because both absolute finiteness and infinity are nothing.”

WorldUniverseInfinityAbsoluteBeingUniversal MindFinitudeNonbeing
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Every part of the Absolute is connected and interconnected through the intrinsic value of everything that exists. The absolute value of the finite is absolute in its finitude and infinitude. Its finiteness makes connection and relationships (life) possible in the absolute sense. The infiniteness of the finite is absolute because it lies in the ability of the finite to resemble the infinite in its potential for variations. Every finite value is potentially infinite.”

UniverseCosmosInfinityAbsoluteUniversal MindFinitudeDejan StojnaovicFinite Values
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness. How very clean. Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”

WritingDeathInternetMemoryDustImmortalityJapanMortalityForgettingAnthropologyFinitudeDigital ImmortalityDigital AnthropologyQuadrillions
Book:Inheritance from Mother
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“But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.”

LifeDeathUncertaintyCoronavirusPandemicPandemic QuotesFinitudeCovid19 Pandemic
Book:No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear
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“I found a deep kinship between Mahler's recurrent attempts to confront all sides of life and to affirm himself in the face of his own finitude, and Aschenbach's dedication to persevere in the literary evocation of beauty. Exploring this kinship led me to reflect on many of Mahler's songs and symphonies - and particularly his great masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde. The end result was a way of reading Mann that I hadn't originally anticipated at all.”

WayEndsFacesSongReadingFoundSidesResultsDedicationExploringMasterpieceLiedSymphonyPersevereKinshipEnd ResultsFinitudeMahler
Author:Philip Kitcher
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“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”

ThinkingMindConsciousnessKnowingMeditationAwarenessPureEternalConsciousYogaInfinityFiniteMeditatingDissolutionMeditation PracticeYoga PracticeConscious AwarenessObjectificationMergingMeditation MindMeditation MindfulnessInspiring YogaMeditation LifeFinitudeDaily MeditationAwareness Of LifeBody AwarenessDeep MeditationInspirational Meditation
Author:Voltaire
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“In love at one of its poles you find the personal, and at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion — Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial — I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible? Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. For love is most free and at the same time most bound. If God were absolutely free there would be no creation. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.”

IfsLifeMadeWould BeStrongLove IsMysteryCreationEgoInfiniteBoundsDenialLiberationFiniteBondageAssertionHere I AmWhat Is LoveFinitude
Author:Rabindranath Tagore
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“Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.”

ThinkingGivingHeartMayBookMomentsGrowsHoursMeditationLessonsYogaWiserFinitude
Book:The Works of William Cowper, Esq., Comprising His Poems, Correspondence, and Translations: With a Life of the Author
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“In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible.”

NeedsDoeHas BeensLife IsCreativeDoubtRiskExpressionConcernUltimateOvercomingSafetyConvictionDenyExistentialSymptomsFanaticismRepressionRepressedUnshakableCreative LifeFinitudeUnshakable FaithPharisaism
Book:Dynamics of Faith
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“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude.”

KnowsDoeSoulMomentsMightEarsAbsolutesIronyIronicIndispensablePersonal LifeCleaningWhisperingBaptismRegenerationIrony Of LifeFinitudeRejuvenation
Author:Soren Kierkegaard
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“I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.”

InspirationalHumansLongPurposeWorkHuman BeingsExistenceMeditationDeterminationPerseveranceConvictionAccomplishFulfillmentStakesStrangest SecretYour Purpose In LifeFinitude
Book:Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield: Collected from His Writings and Speeches
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