Quotes from Jennifer Michael Hecht

Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth.

Here one does not use logic to conquer chaos. Rather, one uses logic because the logic itself is beauty, is truth. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

brave thinking about truth is the secret to happiness: concerted and regular contemplation will transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence.

Without the outside context of a political war between faith and reason, Epicurus does not fear that any single point he might award to the religious will be used against him. Nor is he eager to have his followers shunning prayer or ritual in order to demonstrate publicly their disbelief. Outside the context of a political war between faith and reason, more nuanced arrangements may be safely undertaken.

2004 film called What the Bleep Do We Know!?

His philosophy insists that ethics comes first, that "ethics precedes ontology": the first thing we know is our own being, and the way that we know everything else is through the other person.

But the ultimate aim of it all—what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of life, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving.

Why do people report themselves to be as happy as they were back when we all had less? Well, for one thing, we are comparing two societies that are both majestically wealthy in comparison to almost all societies throughout history. Neither the surveyed Americans of the 1950s nor those of the 2000s were struggling with endemic distress- hunger, pain, humiliation. And average people who are not in such distress are statistically more likely to call themselves happy than not.

have the keys to my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.

Do you have a potent way to sustain your sense of meaning, courage, peace, and awe?

The wonder paradox is the miracle that we are blown away by the experiences of consciousness. Religion and art invite us to a world bigger than normal life, into contact with the weirdness of our human situation. We live within paradoxes. We feel permanent though well aware of death. The consciousness paradox is the startling fact that soft matter afloat in a bone bowl made Mozart's sonatas, Shakespeare's plays, and the whole astounding modern world.

It's as if we have lamps but won't plug them in because our ancestors believed electricity was spirit-made. Having lost belief in spirits, we sit in the dark. There's no need. We have holidays and rituals, crafted like tungsten and glass for glowing. We have poems that buzz with electric charge. Let's plug them in.

Some were taking this or that nervine cure-all, but the best nervine for a man who is not absolutely past repair, is to break away entirely from his calling or greed and camp out on the sea shore...and patiently wait for the return of good health." James Bradley

Hope, ye miserable. Ye happy, take heed.

Either the universe is a cold dead place with a little growth of sentient but atomized beings each all by him- or herself trying to generate meaning, or we are in a universe that is alive with a growth of sentient beings whose members have made a pact with each other to persevere.

There are an infinite variety of secret connections and associations in the vast system of things," and no one can know what he or she might be able to do sometime in the unforeseeable future.

People across history speak of being haunted by suicides and tempted by them toward the grave.

Wallace Stevens wrote, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke

To find your own poem to help with making decisions, look for one that mentions choices or roads. We want to reach a field of contemplation, a state of mind near daydream, a mood of thought without the stress of a demanded answer, because when we're there we can hear more parts of ourselves.

Petrarch also writes that suicides are caused by anger, disdain, impatience, and "a kind of furious forgetfulness of what thou art.

If humanity's central existential difficulty comes from the fact that we have humanness—consciousness, hopes, dreams, loneliness, shame, plans, memory, a sense of fairness, love—and the universe does not, that means that we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions.

Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture's basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains' basic formation.