A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the...

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare – or, if not, some equally brainy bird – who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced...

The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as...

Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was...

We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

The square root of I is I.

Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis: where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

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...