Quotes & Sayings About Finitude

For thousands of years, it had been nature
and its supposed creator
that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs ... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. — Alain De Botton

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don't mean to imply that I'm any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn't mean anything at all. — Eugene Ionesco

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. — Paul Tillich

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. — Philip Kitcher

We are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite. — Ilyas Kassam

Prayer if it is real is an acknowledgment of our finitude, our need, our openness to be changed, our readiness to be surprised, yes, astonished by the "beams of love." — Douglas V. Steere

Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life. — Michael Chabon

The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendence to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to "die," in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it. To what? Kierkegaard answers: to infinitude, to absolute transcendence, the the Ultimate Power of Creation which made finite creatures. — Ernest Becker

For death and the disease that is its harbinger are the most brutal reminders of the radical finitude of human existence. — Jeffrey P. Bishop

The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself. — Paul Tillich

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. — Simon Critchley

A great leader acknowledges his or her finitude, and depends fully on the mighty powerful arm of strength of a Great God, to execute equity and justice for all. — Josephine Akhagbeme

As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion). — Kenny Smith

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing. — Kilroy J. Oldster

If you look at your average contemporary person, the potential for tragedy is immense. The people and things we love and value are strewn across the globe. Any number of health disasters can befall you or them.
The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for confabulation and self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay. There needs to be a basic denial of our finitude and insignificance in the larger scene. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah just to get out of bed in the morning. — William Hirstein

The antidote to busyness of soul is not sloth and indifference. The antidote is rest, rhythm, death to pride, acceptance of our own finitude, and trust in the providence of God. — Kevin DeYoung

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. — Rabindranath Tagore

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. — Soren Kierkegaard

The problem of modern man is no longer so much how he can live with gods and demons, but how he can survive with the bomb, revolution and the destruction of the balance of nature. He usurps more and more of nature and takes it under his control. The vital question for him, therefore, is how this world which he has usurped can be human- ized.36 His main problem is no longer the universal finitude which he experiences in solidarity with all other creatures, but the humanity of his own world. — Jurgen Moltmann

As people become aware of the finitude of their life, they do not ask for much. They do not seek more riches. They do not seek more power. They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in this world
to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities. In modern society, we have come to assume that debility and dependence rule out such autonomy. — Atul Gawande

There is sorrow in finitude. The Self is beyond time, space and objects. It is infinite and hence of the nature of absolute happiness. — Adi Shankara

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. — Ben Lerner

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Minae Mizumura

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude. — Irvin D. Yalom

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite. — Barbara Cassin

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity. — Voltaire

All finite things are limited expressions, graciously imparted, of that actuality that he possesses in infinite abundance. And, simply said, this way of thinking about God is - or so the classical traditions claim - the inevitable result of any genuinely coherent attempt to prescind from the conditions of dependent finitude to a rational definition of the divine. — David Bentley Hart

God who doesn't know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn't yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn't know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say "I am that I am" without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived "in order to see" that is God's, the first stroke of time, before time, God's exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy. — David Wills

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside. — Gilles Deleuze

The world as it is is the world as God sees it, not as we see it. Our vision is distorted, not so much by the limits of finitude as by sin and ignorance. But the more we raise ourselves in the scale of being, the more will our ideas about God and the world correspond to reality. — William R. Inge

When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him. — Jurgen Moltmann

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. — N. Katherine Hayles

Time decides the limits of existence. Nothing can be infinite if it exists in time. — Raheel Farooq

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? — Rene Descartes

You are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and I temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this — William Faulkner

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter
to inflict that version of himself on other people
was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.
He was also afraid that it might hurt.
And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.
And the question was:
The question was: — Jonathan Franzen

The person who never sets priorities is the person who does not believe in his own finitude. — Kevin DeYoung

PERFECTIONISM Perfectionism is a family system rule and a core culprit in creating toxic shame. We see it also in both the religious and cultural systems. Perfectionism denies healthy shame. It does so by assuming we can be perfect. Such an assumption denies our human finitude because it denies the fact that we are essentially limited. Perfectionism denies that we will often make mistakes — John Bradshaw

The "stigma" of finitude which appears in all things and in the whole of reality and the "shock" which grasps the mind when it encounters the threat of nonbeing reveal the negative side of the mystery, the abysmal element in the ground of being. This negative side is always potentially present, and it can be realized in cognitive as well as in communal experiences. It is a necessary element in revelation. Without it the mystery would not be mystery. Without the "I am undone" of Isaiah in his vocational vision, God cannot be experienced (Isa. 6: 5). Without the "dark night of the soul," the mystic cannot experience the mystery of the ground. — Paul Tillich

We are beings who seek the infinity of beauty over the finitude of time. — J.M. Campos

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation. — Hans Jonas

Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness. DAVID AUGSBURGER — Paul David Tripp