Quotes About Philosophy

When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, -- as near as I can figure out, God is dead. Luckman answered, I didn't know He was sick.

Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void.

Watching him, Juliana thought, It's idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped.

in Parsifal: You see, my son, here time turns into space.

Io sono vivo, voi siete morti

The Empire Never Ended

David Hume, the great­est skep­tic of them all, once remarked that after a gath­er­ing of skep­tics met to pro­claim the verac­i­ty of skep­ti­cism as a phi­los­o­phy, all of the mem­bers of the gath­er­ing nonethe­less left by the door rather than the win­dow. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philoso­phers weren't tak­ing what they said seri­ous­ly.

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.

The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn't matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.

You can't go from people to nonpeople.

I didn't get anything from holding onto those handles," Rick said. "Mercer talked to me but it didn't help. He doesn't know any more than I do. He's just an old man climbing a hill to his death." "Isn't that the revelation?" Rick said, "I have that revelation already.

I remember something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: 'For a penny,' the Buddha said, 'I can board a ferry and do that.' It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.

every particle being connected with every other; you can't fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.

In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.

the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.

Don't you feel it?" he kidded her. "The historicity?

It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don't know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.

Dr Stone wasn't insane; Stone was a healer. He held down the right job. Probably he healed many people and in many ways. He adapted his therapy to the individual, not the individual to the therapy.

Nothing is true