“Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.”

— Václav Havel

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)
Context: There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we …" by Václav Havel?

Václav Havel photo

Václav Havel126

playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of … 1936–2011

Related quotes

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard book Simulacra and Simulation

Source: Simulacra and Simulation

“We live in a world where almost everything is worthless and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.”

Greg McKeown (author) book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Journal Articles

“The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 8, “Pollen Grains and Magic Bullets” (p. 258)

“No local reality can explain the type of world we live in.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 13, The Future Of Quantum Reality, p. 245

“Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 9 - Countdown

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 18.

“Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter XIV.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

“It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.”

Aldous Huxley book The Perennial Philosophy

Source: The Perennial Philosophy

“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

“Of the inhabitants then of worlds other than our own we can know still less having no standards by which to appraise them.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

ibid.

Related topics