Existential Limitation Quotes

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

That love is all there is, Is all we know of love.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool.

INCOMPOSSIBLE, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.

Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.

We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe

Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

The assumption of being merely individuals is our greatest limitation.

As mortals, we're ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.

You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought.

It is not possible to express the most precious insights, To see all that craves to be seen, To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe, To learn all that needs to be learned, To live without dying, And I am sad about it. But I lived And I am happy about that.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison.

Life is full of alternatives but no choice.

It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in Nature and in the world of though. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting and vanishing.

But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one