Roberto Unger Quotes

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

Life is an incurable disease.

The world is the mirror of myself dying.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.

At the heart of life lies a mystery that everybody has to wrestle with. What the heck are we doing here? How does this world work, and how do I fit?

At the end of the day, we came into the world naked, and that's the way we're going to go.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.

Every time I wake, I understand how easy it is to be nothing.

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

You get to a certain age, and you feel like you know who you are, and how you fit into the world, and how the world sort of perceives you. And you get pretty set in that. And then things can happen that can turn it upside.