Quotes About Philosophy

She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?

What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?

It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.

The proper study of Mankind is Everything.

Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

Those walls and bars are there for a reason," said Crake. "Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases." "Them?" "Nature and God." "I thought you didn't believe in God," said Jimmy. "I don't believe in Nature either," said Crake. "Or not with a capital N.

She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments

God is a cluster of neurons.

Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive, so it was best not to discuss such a thing.

It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.

Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.

I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it...

Just remember, dear Friends, What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.

it is no longer possible to be both human and alive)

the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar.

Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

What is the real breath of a man— the breathing out or the breathing in? Such was the nature of the gods

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Oblivion was increasingly attractive, since why retain your brain when no amount of thinking could even begin to solve the problem?

At the subatomic level, you can't even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist.' 'You're confusing Cordelia," I say. Cordelia has lit a cigarette and is looking out the window, where several squirrels are chasing one another around the lawn. She is paying no attention to any of this. Stephen considers Cordelia. "Cordelia has a tendency to exist," is what he says.

Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.