existential tension Quotes

Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.

I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social.

Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension.

Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory.

We humans are destined to live with our feet on the earth and our heads in the heavens, and we can never be at peace because we are pulled both ways.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

What, at peace with the Father and at war with the children? It cannot be.

Death is not earnest in the same way the eternal is. To the earnestness of death belongs precisely that remarkable capacity for awakening, that resonance of a profound mockery which, detached from the thought of the eternal, is an empty and often brash jest, but together with the thought of the eternal is just what it should be, utterly different from the insipid solemness which least of all captures and holds a thought with tension like that of death.