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Life Quotes by Hannah Arendt

52 Life quotes by Hannah Arendt

All Life quotes Hannah Arendt’s page

Hannah Arendt sees death as a quiet finish that adds completeness to life. She believes that thinking and being fully alive are the same thing. She notes that pain and effort are natural parts of how life works. She also mentions that stability is needed for change in any civilization.

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To think and to be fully alive are the same.

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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.

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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either…

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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all…

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Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.

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“The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.”

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Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.

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Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things…

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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for…

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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility,…

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According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society.…

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Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold…

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A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad…

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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it…

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“Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This…

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There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is…

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No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost…

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There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of…

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“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is…

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the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is…

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“And if he did not always like what he had to do...he never forgot what the alternative would have been. Not only…

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The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything…

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... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing…

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Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an…

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“To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and…

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“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity.…

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“With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each…

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“On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never “explain” what we…

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“The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything…

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“To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life…

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“However, the enormous superiority of contemplation over activity of any kind, action not excluded, is not Christian in origin. We find it…

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“Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of…

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“Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of…

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“Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are…

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Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside…

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The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they…

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I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where…

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Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions…

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More by Hannah Arendt

“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,…

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one…

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of…

The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and…

There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his…

“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a…

the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left…

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are…

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to…

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

“Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of…

“It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity,…

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.