"Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through : the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the , is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet (1972), Section 4.21
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ontology
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Ontology
50 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ontology →
Related Quotes
"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether …"
"One is what one is, partly at least."
"On bourgeois ground... change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to…"
"The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—there is only one world, the natural world, exhi…"
"Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epist…"
"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). Sh…"
"Systems is an epistemology (making a statement of the kind: 'A certain type of knowledge may be expressed in systems …"
"Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radic…"
"[Women's Liberation] ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society an…"
"Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, a…"