Latest Quotes

“If you saw somebody trying to resolve a spat with a spouse by putting pen to paper and setting up numbered premises, you'd find it a crazy way to settle things, and maybe would also brand it as a tactic for fleeing the real issues. Only in philosophy does this sort of exactitude win an imprimatur; e…”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“Only a mad person would want to conduct their life with complete, Spock-like logicality. We are possessed not of minds alone, but of hearts, emotions, needs, instincts, and habits; and we inhabit social contexts.”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“In the sphere of religion, proofs for the existence of God don't always sway people into belief (the ontological argument of Anselm is notorious for not converting those who think it is sound); intellectual solutions to the problem of evil, however formidable, often fail to soothe the gut-level feel…”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“When a philosopher publishes an article called 'Why There Are No People' (an actual title!), he invites a joke: Whom does he think he's writing for? Whom will he blame if he gets turned down for tenure?”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“That nobody is really a skeptic -- even while philosophizing -- becomes clear if you watch what we philosophers do, not what we say.”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“An assumption that lies behind the questions we religious philosophers get asked is that philosophers internalize the conclusions that their intellects draw -- and live by them. David Hume taught us otherwise. Hume was fascinated by the divorce between philosophy and practical life. In my study, he…”

— David Shatz, The Overexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

“I didn't come to religion, I merely managed to hold on to it in conducive circumstances.”

— David Shatz, God and the Philosophers

“We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

— T.S Eliot, The Four Quartets

“We must be still and still moving into another intensity.”

— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

“Aquarians are not traditional and do not want traditional partners. They think it’s much cooler and more attractive when someone marches to the beat of their own drum than being a drone who does what is expected of them at every turn.”

— Chrissy Stockton, Chrissy Stockton, 11 Things You Need To Know Before You Date An Aquarius

“In my beginning is my end.”

— T.S Eliot, The Four Quartets

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.”

— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

“O nature, o nature. Why do you not deliver on what you promised back then? Why do you deceive your children so?”

— Giacomo Leopardi, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“A young boy and his grandfather in an old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest may cast their eyes on the same giant redwood, yet they do not see the same phenomenon. Because of their age difference, it appears one way to the boy, another to his elder. The sky I see today is more or less the same…”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“Only age gives time a measure of reality.”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“Nothing in the universe— be it the newborn infant or the universe itself— is without age.”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it.”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age

“The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the pas…”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Robert Pogue Harrison: Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age (Hardcover); 2014 Edition

“It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, sh…”

— Robert Pogue Harrison, Robert Pogue Harrison: Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age (Hardcover); 2014 Edition

“Our Earth in 1969 is not the planet I call mine.”

— W. H. Auden, Doggerel by a Senior Citizen