Telos Quotes & Sayings

When I consider the deeper meaning of yoga, I realize it's about a lot more than simply performing a variety of postures on a mat. — Carre Otis

I truly love the game; I wouldn't be playing if I didn't love the game. I'm not getting paid astronomical dollars; it's truly for the love of the game of basketball. — Michael Jordan

Nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. Therefore, the secular order cannot be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and theocracy has no political but only a religious meaning. — Walter Benjamin

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos ). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always. — Jacques Derrida

Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good. — Epicurus

The light of Christ illuminates the laboratory, his speech is the fount of communication, he makes possible the study of humans in all their interactions, he is the source of all life, he provides the wherewithal for every achievement of human civilization, he is the telos of all that is beautiful. He is, among his many other titles, the Christ of the academic road. — Mark Noll

Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think - of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what'll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster - depression, hyperinflation - and then it'll be showtime: We'll either wake up and retake our freedom or we'll fall apart utterly. Like Rome - conqueror of its own people. — David Foster Wallace

That was one of the saddest things about people
their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood. — Alexandra Adornetto

Dostoevsky's underground man ... observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones ... He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned. — John Carroll

Tell me a legend," he said out of nowhere, and he realised they were making stories of each other, or themselves. — Matthew Salesses

When you take a shower in space, you have to press the water onto your body to clean yourself, and then you gotta vacuum it off. — Ace Frehley

Every present moment will offer itself as a window onto eternity, a doorway to the infinite. — Deepak Chopra

Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill. — Stephen Graham

Be prepared for negative responses sometimes. It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's just sometimes you're not the right look, or you're not really what they were envisioning. — Bailee Madison

A committee appointed by the President of a company will report what the President wishes to hear. Would they dare report otherwise?. — W. Edwards Deming

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.] — George Gaylord Simpson

All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one. For a classical hero, dying in a retirement home with a rude nurse and a network of tubes coming into and out of your nose would not be the attractive telos for a life. And, of course, we have this modern illusion that we should live as long as we can. As — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes - a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance - with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. — Jonathan Franzen

Despair is the inevitable hopelessness of life without light. — Jim Berg

I do not have the money anymore. It was all yours, after all. I slipped the check into the silk lining of the coffin when I kissed you good-bye for the last time. — Jodi Picoult

Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. — Alasdair MacIntyre