Thomas Nagel Quotes

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.

Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.

Women are going to form a chain, a greater sisterhood than the world has ever known.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

There is not one world for man and one for animals, they are part of the same one and lead parallel lives.

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.

Thoughts rule the world.

A bike is the world's most used form of transportation

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

The world in which we live is the only world about which our senses can testify.

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world

The spirit, if it could be seen with mortal eyes, would appear in bodily shape like a full-grown person with individual endowments that make it a counter-part of the body in which it [resides,] "that which is temporal in the likeness of that which is spiritual." (D&C 77:2.) It was that which came from God and entered at birth into the infant body prepared by its mortal parents. The spirit was of the "Lord from heaven." The physical body was "of the earth, earthy," (2 Cor. 15:47) or in other words, composed of the elements of which the things in the physical world are composed.

The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

The world changed somewhat in form during its progress, but never in substance.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

I go to the real world, not the Internet.

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.