I feel like everyone I meet is an imaginary friend. I don't know. The older I get the more I wonder what's real.
It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.
No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.
Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.
We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement.
In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is.
The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.
You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great... He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born to die, and reasoning but to err.
It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.
The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is.
If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
