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“If we accept that our life trip is continuous "becoming," shaped by both the freedom to explore and the constraints of finitude, we can embrace the liberty to create meaning in a world where no ultimate meaning is guaranteed. ("Living on probation" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite.”
― Ilyas Kassam

“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”
― Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother

“The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be. (44)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lifes matter and why we care. (49)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship. (43)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair.
The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evilsâ€� descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitationâ€� roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.”
― Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

“To return to my family house is to be reminded of how my life is dependent on history: both the natural history of evolution and the social history of those who came before me. Who I can be and what I can do is not generated solely by me. My life is dependent on previous generations and on those who took care of me, with all of us in turn dependent on a history of the Earth that so easily could have been different and that might never have brought any of us into being.

Moreover, my life is historical in the sense that it is oriented toward a future that is not given. The worlds of which I am a part, the projects I sustain and that sustain me, can flourish and change in a dynamic way, but they can also break apart, atrophy, and die. The worlds that open up through my family and friends, the project that shape my work and political commitments, carry the promise of my life but also the risk that my life will be shattered or fail to make sense. In a word, both my life and the projects in which I am engaged are finite. (3-4)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. (4)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“There is a limit circumscribed to your time - if you do not use it to clear away your clouds, it will be gone, and you will be gone, and the opportunity will not return.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Imprisoned for ten millennia inside its limitless mind, now finite. Now free.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“Religious reconciliation is [...] always deferred to an unattainable future, when we will be absolved from the finitude of life. A secular reconciliation, by contrast, recognizes that “there is nothing degrading about being aliveâ€� (as Hegel puts it in a poignant phrase). Being vulnerable to pain, loss, and death is not a fallen condition but inseparable from being someone for whom something can matter. The point is not that we should embrace pain, loss, and death. The idea of such an embrace is just another version of the religious ideal of being absolved from vulnerability. If we embraced pain we would not suffer, if we embraced loss we would not mourn, and if we embraced death we would not be anxious about our lives. Far from advocating such invulnerability, a secular reconciliation with finitude acknowledges that we must be vulnerable—we must be marked by the suffering of pain, the mourning of loss, the anxiety before death—in order to lead our lives and care about one another. Only through such an acknowledgment can we turn away from the religious promise of absolution and turn toward our time together. Only through such an acknowledgment can we understand the urgency of changing our lives. We are reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason we are not reconciled to living unworthy lives. We demand a better society and we know that it depends on us. In taking action, we are not waiting for a timeless future but grasp in practice that our time is all we have.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Nothing in the world can be sustained, neither bugles nor hope nor woe nor desire nor common well-being nor horns, and even redemption, that suspect covenant, can be revised by the bitter and loveless Christ to whom nothing, not even life, is irretrievable.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Trust

“The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise, that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask the question, ‘Why are we?â€�
But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth? Is evil absolute and ultimate?
The river has its boundaries, its bank, but is a river all banks or are the banks the final facts about the river? Do not these obstructions themselves give its water an onward motion?
The towing rope binds a boat, but is bondage its meaning? Does it not at the same time draw the boat forward? The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement which is towards perfection.
The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love.
The idea of God that man has in his being is the wonder of all wonders. He has felt in the depths of his life that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect. Just as a man who has an ear for music realises the perfection of a song, while in fact he is only listening to a succession of notes.
Man has found out the great paradox that what is limited is not imprisoned within its limits; it is ever moving, and therewith shedding its finitude every moment. In fact, imperfection is not a negation of perfectness. Finitude is not contradictory to the infinity. They are but completeness manifested in parts; infinity revealed within bounds.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana

“The finitude of pain arises from unwavering faith in love.”
― Daniel Gumiero

“But nothing is more difficult than to accept the last impassable border. Everything finite would like to extend itself into infinity. The individual wants to continue his life indefinitely, and in many Christian lands a superstition has developed inside and outside the churches which misinterprets eternal life as endless duration, and does not perceive that an infinity of the finite could be a symbol for hell. In the same way, families resist their finitude in time and in space and destroy each other in a reciprocal battle to eliminate the frontier. But most important for the possibility of peace is the acceptance of their own finitude by the nations - of their time, of their space, and of the finitude of their worth.”
― Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions

“The Absolute is “finiteâ€� but infinite in its potential. This statement is only theoretical because there is no finitude or infinity in the Absolute without the world as we see it, for the Absolute is limitless beyond the spatial and temporal realm. We can think of limitlessness, infinity, and finitude only in the context of their potential.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Zero of God is still Zero. âˆ�
Zero of Nothingness is still Zero. �
Zero plus Zero is still Zero.
A = 0 + 0
Absolute is the sum of two zeros.
0 + 0 = 0
Absolute is an ultimate Zero.
A = B + N or (A = S + N) (where A is Absolute, B is Being, and N is Nonbeing, or S is Something and N is Nothing)
Infinity is either the absolute finitude or absolute potential.
âˆ� = 0”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Infinity is a contradiction in itself. The only way for the concept of infinity to function appropriately in the world is to be imagined because if there is infinity, there is no end, which is impossible. Anything that exists must be “finite,â€� although there is no end to the world’s potential and its cycles. In this sense, absolute is infinite. Infinity is the potential, whereas concrete manifestations of the Absolute are finite. Any particular Universe is the manifestation of the Absolute (Universal Mind) and is finite. For that reason, universes, creation, and life are not repetitions of the absolute potential but are representations of this potential in an always new yet finite way (which does not exclude potential recurrences). The Universal Mind must be infinite in a way that the Nothing is infinite—everywhere and nowhere. In that state, everywhere is nowhere, and this nowhere is everywhere.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Infinity, strictly speaking, is not compatible with existence or life. Still, finitude and infinity are compatible. Their compatibility lies in the infinite potential of the Being. Although Being is finite in any actual realization, its potential and existence are infinite in a broader sense. The main savior of existence is not the world as a repetition of similar or the same cycles, but a continuation of always new births, rebirths of Universes, not the copies (although they are possible) of the previous ones but always new and different, based on the absolute potential of the Being for infinite variety.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Possibilities are infinite. Absolute is infinite in its potential and unaware of all possibilities. Every new cycle explores the new possibility of where free will lies. The Universe is “learningâ€� its potential and creative power from itself through its endless cycles and variations. Its cycles are not the same. Here lies the spark of freedom and potential for free will that makes determinism and free will compatible.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Nothing represented by a number is absolute; every number is divisible. When divided, it stays the same in the volume of its limited absolute, which lives in its relative volumes. Even one can be divided into “infinityâ€�; not only the Absolute or the Absolute One, but a “small,â€� “regularâ€� one can be divided within itself almost without a limit.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“The voyage toward infinity is a voyage without an end. The biggest is not closer to infinity than the smallest. The voyage toward infinity is the voyage through the biggest and the smallest. The biggest is closer to one imagined “edgeâ€� of infinity, and the smallest is closer to the “other.â€� At this point, they meet. However, infinity is only one.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Infinity, or absolute multitude, is impossible based on logic or numbers. If there were no possibility for particularities (any particular entities or worlds) to end, that would be the end of the world; the world would transform itself into a chaotic assembly of numbers, shapes, and not life. Luckily, the world is one, and that One is absolute with its value and “volume.â€� This “volumeâ€� can dissolve within itself but is impossible without the “actual infinityâ€� (potential).”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Every part of the Absolute is connected and interconnected through the intrinsic value of everything that exists. The absolute value of the finite is absolute in its finitude and infinitude. Its finiteness makes connection and relationships (life) possible in the absolute sense. The infiniteness of the finite is absolute because it lies in the ability of the finite to resemble the infinite in its potential for variations. Every finite value is potentially infinite.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Absolute time is eternity. (Eternity = Present)
AT = Et (AT = absolute time; Et = Eternity)
Absolute space is infinity.
AS = �
AT = �
AT + AS = �
� = 0
The Being, the Universe, is finite.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“The Being is finite and infinite. It is finite while contained within itself. When it is within itself as One, it becomes its opposite—the Nonbeing.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Absolute, without the world or universe, is finite. When the Being is equal to the Nonbeing, the Absolute becomes the same—the Nonbeing. The World-Universe is possible only through the active relationship between the Being and the Nonbeing. The absolute potential of the Being and the Nonbeing is initiated and becomes the source of space and time (spacetime), as we understand it, and is the source of infinity as a never-ending potential. Absolute finiteness is infinity because both absolute finiteness and infinity are nothing.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“The Finitude of the Being makes infinity.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“My freedom therefore requires that I can ask myself what I *should* do with my time. Even when I am utterly absorbed in what I do, what I say, and what I love, the possibility of this question must be alive in me. Being engaged in my activities, I must run the risk of being bored--otherwise my engagement would be a matter of compulsive necessity. Being devoted to what I love, I must run the risk of losing it or giving it up--otherwise there would be nothing at stake in maintaining and actively relating to what I love. Most fundamentally, I must live in relation to my irrevocable death--otherwise I would believe that my time is infinite and there would be no urgency in dedicating my life to anything.

The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die--that our lifetime is indefinite but finite--can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities. This is why all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of *unfreedom.*”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom