14 quotes
Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.
Mortal Questions (1979)
I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death.
Mortal Questions (1979)
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental effort of will.
Mortal Questions (1979)
All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.
Mortal Questions (1979)
To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
Mortal Questions (1979)
If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
Mortal Questions (1979)
It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now.
Mortal Questions (1979)
There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive.
Mortal Questions (1979)
[T]he organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does.
Mortal Questions (1979)
If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse — a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
Mortal Questions (1979)
I do not believe that the source of value is unitary — displaying apparent multiplicity only in its application to the world. I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings.
Mortal Questions (1979)
The ethical commonplaces of any period include ideas that may have been radical discoveries in a previous age. This is true of modern conceptions of liberty, equality, and democracy, and we are in the midst of ethical debates which will probably result two hundred years hence in a disseminated moral sensibility that people of our time would find very unfamiliar.
Mortal Questions (1979)
The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.
Mortal Questions (1979)
What is more subjective is not necessarily more private. In general it is intersubjectively available. I assume that the intersubjective ideas of experience, of action, and of the self are in some sense public or common property. That is why the problems of mind and body, free will, and personal identity are not just problems about one's own case.
Mortal Questions (1979)