Paul Virilio Quotes

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

The actuality of all of material Nature is therefore kept out of action and that of all corporeality along with it, including the actuality of my body, the body of the cognizing subject.

We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter.

The body cannot be the soul.

There is nothing in the universe but matter.

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

Nothing exists but atoms and the void.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

We're not in the physical world. The physical world is in us. We create the physical world when we perceive it, when we observe it. And also we create this experience in our imagination. And when I say "we," I don't mean the physical body or the brain, but a deeper domain of consciousness which conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes everything that we call physical reality.

The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

If you look at anything physical, you find out that at the quantum level, it is non-physical.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.