This Life Quotes

“Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free

“Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others who have made you who you are. There are things you cannot leave behind or wish you could retrieve. And there is hope you cannot extinguish—whether buried or insistent, broken or confident, the one never excluding the other. (92)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“We must acknowledge the utter fragility of what holds our lives together—our institutions, our shared labor, our love, our mourning—and yet keep faith with what offers no final guarantee. This is the double movement of secular faith. (377)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“That those who are enslaved or live in poverty may need faith in God to carry on with their lives is not a reason to promote religious faith but a reason to abolish slavery and poverty. (27)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“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

“To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our lives.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“The point of democratic socialism is not to impose a general consensus regarding what matters, but to sustain a form of life that makes it possible for us to own the question of what is worth doing with our lives—what we value individually as well as collectively—as an irreducible question of our lives.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Even the greatest moments of happiness in love—gathering and deepening the qualitative experience of a shared life—cannot be contained in an instant, since the moment is bound up with a network of meaning that extends to the memory of a shared past and anticipations of a future together. (59)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“What we believe deep in our hearts—the hymn ["We Shall Overcome"] avows—is not that God will save us but that we shall overcome our subordination through collective action. (372)”
― 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

“The depths of life are not revealed through faith in eternity. Rather, our spiritual commitments proceed from caring for what will be irrevocably lost and remaining faithful to what gives no final guarantee. Secular faith will always be precarious, but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom. (36)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“If my life were complete, it would not be my life, since it would be over. In leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsive to the commitments that define who I take myself to be.”
― 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

“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

“Christian charity does not seek to abolish poverty in this life but rather maintains the poor in an asymmetrical position of dependence on those who offer them charity, leaving them waiting for redemption in an eternal life (the new Jerusalem).”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“[T]hat we collectively value the 'growth' of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To make our emancipation actual will require both our political mobilizations and our rational arguments; it will require our general strikes and our systematic reflections, our labor and our love, our anxiety and our passion.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“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 alive” (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

“I am not merely causally determined by nature or norms but act in light of norms that I can challenge and transform.”
― Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom