Quotes About Transcendence

Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. [...] Human existence is not characterized by self-actualization but rather by what I call self-transcendence—pointing beyond itself.

M]eaning cannot be grasped by merely intellectual means, for it supersedes essentially—or to speak more specifically—dimensionally, man's capacity as a finite being. [...] This meaning necessarily transcends man and his world and, therefore, cannot be approached by merely rational processes. [...] [W]hat we have to deal with is no intellectual or rational process, but a wholly existential act which perhaps could be described by [...] 'the basic trust in Being'.

S]elf-transcendence is one of the basic features of human existence. Only as man withdraws from himself in the sense of releasing self-centered interest and attention will he gain an authentic mode of existence.

M]eaning must not coincide with being; meaning must be ahead of being; meaning sets the pace of being. Existence falters unless it is lived in terms of transcendence toward something beyond itself.

Due to the essentially self-transcendent quality of human existence man is a being reaching out beyond himself.

It is a tenet of Logotherapy that transcendence is the essence of existence. What is meant by this tenet is that existence is authentic only to the extent to which it points to something that is not itself. [...] Man [...] finds himself only to the extent to which he loses himself in the first place, be it for the sake of something or somebody, for the sake of a cause or a fellow-man, or "for God's sake.

Si existe Dios, estoy convencido de que no tomará a mal que alguien lo intercambie con el propio Yo y se dirija a Él como a un Tú.

Podstata lidské existence spo?ívá v její sebetranscendenci. Být ?lovÄ›kem znamená vždy už být zam??en a nastaven na nÄ›co nebo nÄ›koho, být oddán nÄ›jakému dílu.

only to the extent to which a man commits himself to the fulfilment of his life's meaning [i.e., his vocation], to this extent he also actualizes himself. In other words, self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of the self-transcendence [that is guided by a vocation].

The ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man.

Now when these souls have trodden the full circle of a thousand years, God call's all of them forth in long procession to the Lethe River, and this he does so that when they again visit the sky's vault they may be without memory, and a wish to re-enter bodily life may dawn.

I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it's the blue that lasts.

I want to resemble a sort of liquid light which stretches beyond visibility or invisibility. Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.

She did not know. She did not mind...She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything...-and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty.