“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.”

—  T.S. Eliot

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyo…" by T.S. Eliot?
T.S. Eliot photo
T.S. Eliot 270
20th century English author 1888–1965

Related quotes

Mark Manson photo

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 1, “Don’t Try” (p. 9)

Jack Vance photo
Stanislaw Ulam photo
Arnold Toynbee photo

“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Toynbee, cited in: Arnold Joseph Toynbee, ‎Edward DeLos Myers (1955) A study of history. Vol. 7. p. 388

John Muir photo

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 7: A Sojourn in Cubapage 168, omits the "all". This is a typo: see 1916 edition page 164
Source: The Wilderness World of John Muir

Anaïs Nin photo

“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica
Albert Schweitzer photo

“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Chapter 26
Context: Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.

“We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Marius Melville in Ch. 17
Cassidy (1986)

Georges Bataille photo
Flannery O’Connor photo

“Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Related topics