Jacques Barzun Quotes

I am fascinated by the whole process of what it's like to be alive, whether it's unbelievably uncomfortable and horrible or whether it's quite nice.

I think that being alive is intense for most beings in some way. Even the process of being born is an intense one, and coming to see and understand and experience the physical world, and all that goes along with being a physical being, and experiencing all of these different forms of loss throughout life.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many -- myself and humanity in flux.

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.

What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.

It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body.

I also believe that when one dies, one may wake up to the reality that proves that time does not exist.

To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.

I think that when I die, it might be some time until I know it.

How did you know you're alive, unless you'd once been dead?

Only in unawareness you are mortal. In awareness you are immortal.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance

The consciousness of life is higher than life.

Consciousness is the grave of things, the place where they cease to exist, beyond which they end. And when they have ended, it seems that they no longer have any essential existence except in the visions in me.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.

Man lives in time but his life transcends time.

I'm sure we could all relate because we've all got life. Some people ain't got it

But you're dead,' said Harry. 'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. 'Then... am I dead too?' 'Ah,' said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. 'That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.

[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.

Conscious man, to be sure, has at all times been keenly aware that life is an adventure, that life must, forever, be wrested from death.