Quotes from Jennifer Michael Hecht

Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don't know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you've got nothing to worry about.

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to "renounce his personality," and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

We did not make this world...and our childhood inclinations about how to succeed in it turn out to be wrong: often our courage is needed not to dramatically change reality but to accept it and persist in it.

When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.

Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance

Aurelius says that one reason it doesn't matter how long you live is that this is not theatre, that the whole is not the thing. Each moment is the thing. "The soul obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as...in a play...where the whole action is incomplete if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, 'I have what is my own.

The mistake of Marc Antony's death haunts all suicides, with its reminder that we do not always know where we really are in our story.

Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution

Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.

A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food's contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied.

Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.

History Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild and wished to trade-in all of Eden to have but been a child. In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.

I draw from the absurd three consequences. Which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.

The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers.

Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras's atheism held that society must "denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.

One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that—he questioned their every faith, their every way of life—so they called it atheism.

Jack Miles's wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it.

For Epicurus, living prudently, in deep appreciation of modest pleasures, was not just the route to happiness, it was happiness.

It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.

Expect change. Accept death. Enjoy life. As Marcus Aurelius explained, the brains that got you through the troubles you have had so far will get you through any troubles yet to come.

How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.

If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.