Quotes

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.

Henry David Thoreau, A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers ; Walden, or, Life in the woods ; The Maine woods ; Cape Cod, New York, N.Y, 1854

Logic cannot make me suffer.

R. M. Hare and P. L. Gardiner, Pain and evil, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 38, no. 1, 1964, pp. 91–124, pp. vol

If one goes for a long time without serious pain, one can more or less forget its distinctive nature. But then, when it comes, one is reminded only too well of what it is like, that is, of its reality as a distinctive quality of experience.

Timothy L. S. Sprigge, Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi?: pleasure, pain and value, in Anthony O'Hear (ed.) Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 119–140, p. 127

Most of the time, we live in an illusion of meaningfulness and only some times, when we are philosophically reflective, are we aware of reality and the meaninglessness of our lives. It seems obvious that this has a genetic basis, due to Darwinian laws of evolution. In order to survive and reproduce, it must seem to us most of the time that our actions are not futile, that people have rights. The rare occasions in which we know the truth about life are genetically prevented from overriding living our daily lives with the illusion that they are meaningful. As I progress through this paper, I have the illusion that my efforts are not utterly futile, but right now, as I stop and reflect, I realise that any further effort put into this paper is a futile expenditure of my energy.

Quentin Smith, Moral realism and infinite spacetime imply moral nihilism, in Heather Dyke (ed.) Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, Dordrecht, 2003, pp. 43–54, p. 53

If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sight and Sound, Jackson, 2006, pp. 152-153

He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain’s unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it has his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony.

Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, The fountainhead, New York, 1943, p. 1

[W]e may, without realizing it or even being able to admit it to ourselves, develop patterns of behaviour that encourage or discourage specific behaviors in others, such as the unconscious means by which we cause those whose company we do not enjoy not to enjoy our company.

Peter Railton, Moral realism, Philosophical review, vol. 95, no. 2, 1986, pp. 163–207, p. 187

According to his early biographers, at a certain point in his life Kant had a ‘maxim’ not to smoke more than a single pipe a day, tempted though he was. He adhered to this maxim rigorously. After a while, however, he bought a bigger pipe.

Jens Timmermann, Kant, in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.) The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, 2000, pp. 394–409, p. 39

Analytical philosophers often aim at producing moral principles that may be very complex in structure, full of subclauses and qualifications, because these principles enable them to capture “our moral intuitions” and the precisely worded epicyclic subclauses enable us to deal cleverly with threatened counterexamples of various kinds. […] But the resulting principles often do more to disguise than to state the fundamental value basis on which decisions are to be made.

Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Kant and modern philosophy, Cambridge, 2006, p. 346

[I]t is difficult to believe that the way in which an agent is instrumental in the occurrence of an outcome could be more important than the nature of the outcome itself. Consider the value of an entire human life—of all the good that the life contains. Now suppose that one must choose between killing one person to save two and allowing the two to die. Is it really credible to suppose that how one acts on that single occasion matters more in moral terms than the whole of the life that will be lost if one lets the two die rather than killing the one?

Jeff McMahan, Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid, Ethics, vol. 103, no. 2, 1993, pp. 250–279, p. 279

As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs.

John Gray, Straw dogs: Thoughts on humans and other animals, London, 2002, p. 37

Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty important to me[.]

George Orwell, Coming up for air, San Diego, 1939, p. 8

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man […] with no means of filling up time is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.

George Orwell, Down And Out In Paris And London, Boston, 1933, p. 33

[N]o basta ser antiperonista para ser buena persona, pero basta ser peronista para ser una mala persona.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, Barcelona, 2006, p. 194

[Thoreau] was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort[.]

Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Cornhill Magazine, 1880

I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences.

George Edward Moore, An autobiography, in Schilpp Paul Arthur (ed.) The philosophy of G. E. Moore, Evanston, 1942, pp. 3–39, p. 14

[I]f there were a drug that caused one to hallucinate one’s doctor calling to say that one was not susceptible to the effects of the drug, presumably doctors would find some other way to inform their patients of their immunity than by calling them on the telephone!

William J. Talbott, The illusion of defeat, in James Beilby (ed.) Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, Ithaca, 2002, pp. 153–164, p. 163

In 1998 the king of Bhutan, the small, idyllic Buddhist kingdom nestling high in the Himalayas, announced that his nation’s objective would be the Gross National Happiness. What an enlightened ruler!

Yet one year later he made a fateful decision: to allow television into his country.

Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a new science, London, 2005, p. 77

[T]he appropriate circumstantial perspective to take in an honest and open discussion of what ought to be done (never mind who it may be ‘up to’ to do it) is that of all parties influenceable by the discussion—which one presumes to include one’s interlocutors. This gives rise to an invisible (or unarticulated) ‘we’ in the superscripted position of all ought-judgments. The grain of sense in the saying ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk’ is in its recommendation to plan for the future, taking it as fixed that the milk has been spilt. The same goes for the milk that will be freely spilt by others whose conduct cannot be influenced by us.

I. L. Humberstone, Two kinds of agent-relativity, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 163, 1991, pp. 144, p.166

As Descartes himself remarked, nothing is too absurd for some philosopher to have said it some time; I once read an article about an Indian school of philosophers who were alleged to maintain that it is only a delusion, which the wise can overcome, that anything exists at all; so perhaps it would not matter all that much that a philosopher is found to defend absolute omnipotence.

P. T. Geach, Providence and evil, Cambridge [Eng.] ; New York, 1977, p. 8