Philosopher Quotes on Time

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64

“Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones into dust. Nothing but their words remain. When the hour of the great man has struck he rises to leadership; but before his time has come he is hampered in all that he attempts. I have heard that the successful merchant carefully conceals his wealth, and acts as though he had nothing—that the great man, though abounding in achievements, is simple in his manners and appearance. Get rid of your pride and your many ambitions, your affectation and your extravagant aims. Your character gains nothing for all these. This is my advice to you.”

Attributed to Laozi. Laozi speaking to Confucius. Quoted in James Legge, Texts of Taoism, 34; Quoted from Will Durant , Our Oriental Heritage .

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery .”

Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English (1972)

“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding .”

interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

“The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name. The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation. Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding.”

translated by J.H.McDonald (1996)

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848

“1837 , as quoted in Karl Marx: His Life and Thought by David McLellan, p. 22. See also M. Rubel, "Les Cahiers d'études de Karl Marx (1840-1853)", International Review of Social History ( 1957 )”

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Attributed to Karl Marx:

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Attributed to Karl Marx:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Volume iii, p. 274

“An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196”

Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the

“An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 215”

In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is th

“An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282”

These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,—ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and a

Attributed to Edmund Burke:

“Society is indeed a contract, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter I, as translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), p. 14.; italicized in the original.

“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind , however simple , that does not change every moment .”

An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, p. 44

“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant , man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity , in space and in time , is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death .”

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

Stray Birds

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

45

“As early as 1902 (Bengali Samvat 1309) Rabindranath Tagore wrote that there was no Indian in the history of India written by foreigners: “as if Indians do not exist; only those who have fought and killed among themselves are real ... we are not parasites of India; through hundreds of centuries we have put down tens of thousands of roots in the heart of this land, but unfortunately we have to read a type of history which makes our children forget exactly this. It appears that in (the history of) India we are nobodies; only those who have come from outside matter in (the history of this) land.”

quoted from Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

“quoted from Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.”

As early as 1902 (Bengali Samvat 1309) Rabindranath Tagore wrote that there was no Indian in the history of India written by foreigners: “as if Indians do not exist; only those who have fought and killed among themselves are real ... we are not parasites of India; through hundreds of centuries we have put down tens of thousands of roots in the heart of this land, but unfortunately we have to read

“It was indeed a great day not only for the Sikhs but also for the whole of India when Guru Govinda , defying the age-long conventions of the Hindu society, made his followers one, by breaking down all barriers of caste and thereby made them free to inherit the true blessings of a self-respecting manhood. Sikhism has a brave message to the people and it has a noble record.”

Letter to Mahadevi Desai, 4 January 1937. Quoted in The Essential Tagore , Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

“From In cammino verso il nulla (Towards Nothingness), in Gianni Vattimo , Filosofia al presente: conversazioni con Francesco Barone, Remo Bodei, Italo Mancini, Vittorio Mathieu, Mario Perniola, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Emanuele Severino, Carlo Sini (Philosophy in the Present: conversations with Francesco Barone , Remo Bodei , Italo Mancini , Vittorio Mathieu , Mario Perniola, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Emanuele Severino, Carlo Sini ”), Garzanti, Milan, 1990, pp. 32-33. ISBN 88-11-65871-3 .”

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“From In cammino verso il nulla (On the Way to Nothingness), in Filosofia al presente (Philosophy in the Present), pp. 37-38.”

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Attributed to Emanuele Severino:

“Becoming is impossible; what is, eternally is.”

Attributed to Emanuele Severino:

“The West is the history of the conviction that things become; that conviction is nihilism.”

Attributed to Emanuele Severino:

“All beings are eternal; appearing and disappearing are themselves eternal facts.”

“The general form of the total conception of ideology is being used by the analyst when he has the courage to subject not just the adversary's point of view but all points of view, including his own, to the ideological analysis. At the present stage of our understanding it is hardly possible to avoid this general formulation of the total conception of ideology, according to which the thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character.”

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“The thought of every group is seen as arising out of its life conditions. Thus, it becomes the task of the sociological history of thought to anlayse without regard for party biases all the factors in the actually existing social situation which may influence thought. This sociologically oriented history of ideas is destined to provide modern men with a revised view of the whole historical process.”

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“Conflicting intellectual positions may actually come to supplement one another. It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute.”

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“At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.”

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Attributed to Karl Mannheim:

“Utopia is the ideology of the rising group.”

“Normal science means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements.”

p. 10

“I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.”

Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)

“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”

p. xiii (2012 ed.)

“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”

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“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

p. 5

“Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354”

Truth and Virtue do not necessarily belong to wealth and Power and Distinctions of Big Mansions.

“His reply after being called a heathen by John Marshman. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354”

The editor perhaps may consider himself justified by numerous precedents among the several partisans of different Christian sects in applying the name of heathen to one who takes the Precepts of Jesus as his principal guide in matters of religious and civic duties; as Roman Catholics bestow the appellation of heretics or infidels on all classes of Protestants; and the Protestants do not spare the

“Padari Sisya Sambad Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354”

Ram Mohun replied by writing a satire in Bengali, Padari Sisya Sambad, published in 1823, in order to ridicule the doctrine of Trinity. It was an imaginary dialogue between a European missionary and his three Chinese students. After having taught the dogma, the missionary asked his students whether God was one or many. “The first disciple replied that there were three Gods, the second that there w

“quoted in : Bhaskar Kamble, The Imperishable Seed: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and why this History was Erased, Garuda Prakashan Private Limited, 2022 ISBN 9798885750189 Roy’s letter is quoted in full in (Trevelyan 1838: 65-71).”

In a letter written to Lord Amherst, dated 11 December 1823, he praised the British as having ‘extended their benevolent care to this distant land, actuated by a desire to improve its inhabitants’ and obsequiously pleaded against the setting up of a Sanskrit university, which the British had been contemplating, on the grounds that the ‘Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to k

Attributed to Raja Ram Mohan Roy:

“The customs of one age are not the duties of another.”

“History, too, is meaningful only by indicating some transcendent purpose beyond the actual facts. ... To venture a statement about the meaning of historical events is possible only when their telos becomes apparent.”

Meaning in History (1949), p. 5

“Meaning in History (1949), p. 5”

History, too, is meaningful only by indicating some transcendent purpose beyond the actual facts. ... To venture a statement about the meaning of historical events is possible only when their telos becomes apparent.

“Peter is the apostle of the Father , Paul of the Son , while John is the apostle of the Spirit who is leading to the full truth of the future.”

Meaning in History (1949), p. 210

“Meaning in History (1949), p. 210”

Peter is the apostle of the Father , Paul of the Son , while John is the apostle of the Spirit who is leading to the full truth of the future.

“Meaning in History (1949), p. 212”

The mere fact that Christianity interprets itself as a new Testament, superseding an old one and fulfilling the promises of the latter, necessarily invites further progress and innovations, either religious or irreligious and antireligious—hence the derivation of the secular irreligions of progress from the eschatology of the church, together with their theological pattern.

“No one has a right to speak who, in the midst of thinking , hasn't been overcome with the experience of glimpsing the essence of history .”

Diary Entry (2 March 1916), published in Lamentations of Youth : The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913-1919 , p. 109

Attributed to Gershom Scholem:

“Kabbalah is the secret history of Judaism.”

Attributed to Gershom Scholem:

“Tradition is not the dead repetition of the past, but its living interpretation.”

Attributed to Gershom Scholem:

“Messianism is the most dangerous and the most fruitful element in Judaism.”

Attributed to Gershom Scholem:

“To recover a tradition is also to remake it.”

Attributed to A. N. Prior:

“Tense logic is the logic of time.”

Attributed to A. N. Prior:

“It is past, it is present, it is future: these are the central modes of time.”

Attributed to A. N. Prior:

“Time is what real change requires.”

Attributed to A. N. Prior:

“Logic must do justice to the asymmetry between past and future.”

Attributed to A. N. Prior:

“What was and what will be are not on the same logical footing.”

Attributed to Reinhart Koselleck:

“Concepts are not just mirrors of history; they shape it.”

Attributed to Reinhart Koselleck:

“History takes place in the tension between expectation and experience.”

Attributed to Reinhart Koselleck:

“Modernity is the experience of the acceleration of time.”

Attributed to Reinhart Koselleck:

“The historian must read concepts as carefully as events.”

Attributed to Reinhart Koselleck:

“What we call progress is also the loss of older possibilities.”

“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”

Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.

“Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.”

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”

Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.

“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child – this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”

Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914) , edited by Nicholas Griffin. It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is referring to "the human race". Smith married Russell in December 1894; they divorced in 1921.

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

Nausea, 1938

“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

“Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”

Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)

“The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Pt. II, ch. 1, sec. 1.

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.”

p. 285.

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”

Process and Reality, 1929

“Einstein analyses the ideas of time-order and of simultaneity. Primarily (according to his analysis) time-order only refers to the succession of events at a given place. Accordingly each given place has its own time-order. But these time-orders are not independent in the system of nature, and their correlation is known to us by means of physical measurement. Now ultimately all physical measurement depends upon coincidence in time and place.”

p. 51

“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein.

Attributed to Walter Benjamin:

“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”

Attributed to Walter Benjamin:

“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.”

Attributed to Walter Benjamin:

“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre.”

“Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone , he builds on the preceding one , this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future , wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature , God ’s speaking exemplary model in all works ! Manifestly so in the human species !”

This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" [" Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit "] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299

“This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" [" Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit "] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299”

Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone , he builds on the preceding one , this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future , wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature , God ’s speaking exemplary model in all works ! Manifestly so in the human species !

“With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss ; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor .”

Am sorgfältigsten, mein Freund, meiden Sie die Autorschaft darüber. Zu früh oder unmäßig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wüste und das Herz leer, wenn sie auch sonst keine üblen Folgen gäbe. Ein Mensch, der die Bibel nur lieset, um sie zu erläutern, lieset sie wahrscheinlich übel, und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstößt, durch Feder und Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wi

“in Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”

In his later work, in particular, he voices considerable animus against British colonization in India; in his 1803 preface to a new edition of Forster’s Sakuntala, he says that “English rhyme schemes suit Indian poetry as searing-hot water acts on the sweet blooms of the Mallika, which singe and destroy them (as the English do the Hindus themselves),” and deplores the fact that “‘this cultural and

“The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx , two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks ( Thales ), the second by Galileo . Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History .”

p. 4

Attributed to Louis Althusser:

“Ideology has no history.”

Attributed to Louis Althusser:

“The lonely hour of the last instance never comes.”

Attributed to Louis Althusser:

“Marx's true discovery is the discovery of history as a process without a subject.”

“The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.”

p. 133.

“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .”

p. 148.

“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”

p. 149.

Attributed to Max Horkheimer:

“What is at stake is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.”

“This age of ours consequently has let fall, bit by bit, some of the richest and sweetest fruits that the tree of knowledge has yielded; has thrown away the results of the vigils and labours of the most illustrious men of genius, things of more value, I am almost tempted to say, than anything else in the whole world.”

On the Scarcity of Copyists

“To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day.”

Letter to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro (26 April 1336), "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux" in Familiar Letters as translated by James Harvey Robinson (1898); the name Mount Ventosum relates to it being a windy mountain.

“Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal! When I heard her thus speak, though my fear still clung about me, with trembling voice I made reply in Virgil 's words —”

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Attributed to Petrarch:

“Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceases to enlarge itself, till by broad spreading it disperses to nothing.”

“The peasants will be emancipated if there is a future for Rus and for the Slavic world.”

Appeal to Nobles", (June 1853), Imperial Russia, A Source Book 1700-1917

“An empire that cannot distance itself from such a gruesome sin that so deeply affects its internal structure does not have the right to education, to future development and participation in history.”

Appeal to Nobles", (June 1853), Imperial Russia, A Source Book 1700-1917

“Translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgins, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen , vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968) Part IV: Moscow, Petersburg and Novgorod 1840–1847 (p. 618)”

Без равенства нет брака. Жена, исключённая из всех интересов, занимающих её мужа, чуждая им, не делящая их, — наложница, экономка, нянька, но не жена в полном, в благородном значении слова.

Attributed to Alexander Herzen:

“History has no libretto.”

“The Authority of the 'man of the moment' pertains to the fact that it is he, par excellence, who represents 'actuality', the Present, the 'real presence' of something in the world (Hegel's Gegenwart ), as opposed to the 'poetic' unreality of the past and the 'utopian' unreality of the future.”

pp. 49–50

“It is from Eternity that the representatives of God on earth derive their Authority.”

p. 50

Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

“History is the dialectic of master and slave.”

Attributed to Alexandre Kojeve:

“Philosophy is the wisdom of the wise man at the end of history.”

Attributed to Gianni Vattimo:

“Weak thought is the form philosophy must take after the death of metaphysics.”

Attributed to Gianni Vattimo:

“Secularization is the destiny of Christianity, not its betrayal.”

Attributed to Gianni Vattimo:

“Truth is more event than correspondence.”

Attributed to Gianni Vattimo:

“Hermeneutics is the koine of late modern philosophy.”

“The exalted moment of love is always full of promise: it is not closed in on itself, but open; we see its natural fruitfulness revealed in the child, even if its spiritual fruitfulness remains hidden.”

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“Adrienne von Speyr has brought mysticism back from the clandestine existence into which, increasingly misunderstood, indeed scorned, it had been exiled and silenced by official theology and proclamation and has returned it to the center of salvation history.”

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“What deserves to be called mysticism—not in the vague sense of the history and philosophy of religion, but rather in the Catholic-ecclesial sense—occurs when God's Word is heard, not only with exegetical and theological understanding, but with the whole heart, the whole being, when one is steadfast before the self-disclosure of the heart of God despite fire and night.”

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“Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time.”

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