We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This...

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of...

I do feel that I've managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I'm inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I...

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.

That she is alive is Bra, but that's not what it's all about.

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,...

They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

It is culture that is the bully.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on...

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's...

When you're asked to stay out of a bar you don't just punch the owner--you come back with your army and tear the place down, destroy the whole edifice and everything it stands for. No compromise. If a...

There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

Is beauty enhanced or adulterated by utility?

What is humor?' one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, ''nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.

One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him...

The philosopher's school, ye men, is a surgery: you ought not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain. For you are not in sound health when you enter.

What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?...

An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not...

no religion was superior because they all brought people closer to God