Quotes About Philosophy

I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It's an illusion that I - I personally - really exist; I'm just representative of a type.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think?

What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring? What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?

the universe consisted of misery and hostility and would get you in the end. He looked at the universe the way most people regard an unpaid bill; eventually they will force payment.

Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life.

Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

Law of economy: nothing is waste. Even the unreal. What a sublimity in the process.

Where are you going? Won't you come downstairs and—be with me? There was the most shocking news on TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that, Rick? Do you think it could be true?" "Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought.

You know the old brownshirt term for people who spin philosophy? Eierkopf. Egghead. Because the big double-domed empty heads break so easily . . . in the street brawls.

Better a live dog than a dead prince

It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don't think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.

In other words, the universe itself—and the Mind behind it—is insane. Therefore someone in touch with reality is, by definition, in touch with the insane: infused by the irrational.

Pascal said, All history is one immortal man who continually learns.

I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.

Jump in the urinal and stand on your head I'm the one that's alive. You're all dead. Lean over the bowl and then take a dive All of you are dead. I am alive.

Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of a multitude of subjective realities.

DICK: I think philosophically I fit in with some of the very late pre-Socratic people around the time of Zeno and Diogenes—the Cynics, in the Greek sense. I am inevitably persuaded by every argument that is brought to bear.

The end times were not the end times after all. The end times were always coming but never here, always nearby and influencing us but never realized.

The terrible dilemma of our lives. Whatever happens, it is evil beyond compare. Why struggle, then? Why choose? If all alternatives are the same...

It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice. How can justice fall victim, even, to what is right?

They're not idealists like Joe and me; they're cynics with utter faith. It's a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that

That's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself.

We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us. From