Quotes About Finiteness

We have limits. There is a finiteness to our time and energy. And to live as though there isn't is destructive as well as delusional. It can be hard to tell the truth about our human capacity and limits because few of us want to accept the losses that come with this truth. We can't say yes to everything. We can't go everywhere and see everyone. We can't have it all. We aren't indispensable. We are finite beings who need rest. And that is not a bad thing.

Pain, which is the feeling of our finiteness, is not a fixture in our life. It is not an end in itself, as joy is. To meet with it is to know that it has no part in the true permanence of creation.

Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are.

Understand one thing very clearly. Because all this: your time, this world, your life in it and all of those opportunities, they have a deadline.

The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.

We all have a shelf life.

But in Christendom we play at believing, play at being Christians; as far as possible from any breach with what we love, we remain at home, in the parlor, in the old grooves of finiteness – and then we go and twaddle with one another, or let the pastor twaddle to us, about all the promises which are found in the New Testament, that no one shall harm us, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us, against the Church, etc.

El hombre es una síntesis de lo infinito y lo finito, de lo temporal y lo eterno, de libertad y necesidad; en resumen: es una síntesis. Una síntesis es una relación entre dos factores. Considerado desde este ángulo el hombre todavía no es un yo.»

There are words which close a conversation as with an iron door.

Death is the collapse of time.

Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

[Cats] are blissfully unaware that they have only a finite time in which to finish their 'to do' list.

Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property. The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic.

A pesar de lo descabellado de la teoría de cuerdas, uno de los aspectos que la ha mantenido con vida es que combina satisfactoriamente los dos grandes pilares de la física, la relatividad general y la teoría cuántica, ofreciéndonos una teoría finita de la gravitación cuántica. De ahí viene todo el entusiasmo.

time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It's embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Faith means acting on what God says in spite of what you know, your background, your experience, or even your education. Faith is a recognition of your own finiteness in relation to God's infiniteness.

Our godlike self-understanding, however, keeps colliding with the facts of death and of the fallen finiteness of this world.

When] we practice science (and this is true of all our experience), we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness.

A human being, it is true, is a finite being. However, to the extent to which he understands his finiteness, he also overcomes it.

Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.

It's not until they tell you you're going to die soon that you realise how short life is.