Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it - philosopically speaking - make a noise

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?

NOUMENON, n. That which exists, as distinguished from that which merely seems to exist, the latter being a phenomenon. The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only by a process of reasoning - which is a phenomenon.

There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite.

As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.

If the future and the past really exist, where are they?

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.

But you're dead,' said Harry. 'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. 'Then... am I dead too?' 'Ah,' said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. 'That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.

Bewildered, bewildered, you have no complaint. You are what you are, and you ain't what you ain't.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

The real universe is always one step beyond logic.

if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.