| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 5641 |
| QUOTATION: | Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | William Barrett (b. 1913), U.S. philosopher, editor. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, ch. 3, Doubleday (1958). |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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