Thomas Nagel Quotes
What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs.
Quotes to Explore
-
When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.
-
Let there be a door to thy mouth, that it may be shut when need arises, and let it be carefully barred, that none may rouse thy voice to anger, and thou pay back abuse with abuse.
-
I actually signed on to do 'On the Road' before we started on 'Tron,' but we were in flux for a while, just sort of playing the waiting game, trying to get the right budget and the right cast.
-
There has to be a global mission of human progress.
-
With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.
-
People can be inspired the way I've been inspired by music.
-
The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.
-
Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.
-
I do have, like, a regular childhood. I mean, I'm treated the same.
-
The most important thing that I've figured out is that things work out the way they're supposed to. We try to have all this control and fashion things the way we want, but everything happens for a reason, and in the end it works out the way it's supposed to.
-
When I first moved to New York, all I did was musical theater. That's what I studied at Carnegie Mellon University.
-
I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.
-
It's really fun to see a movie that you've heard about that's really good.
-
I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.
-
To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
-
The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed … Now come the facts to summon us to reflect. They tell us in terribly harsh language that a civilization which develops only on its material side, and not in the sphere of the spirit … heads for disaster.
-
In our personal lives, we have a lot of businesses going on. I have a profession, I'm a father, a spouse, a good member of my community. How much of my time and energy can I allocate to each of those things? What I allocate becomes the strategy I have for my family, and everything else.
-
I used to not watch what I ate. I would just kind of eat whatever.
-
It's always beautiful to sing with other great voices. I like voices in general. It's a big privilege to have great singers next to me.
-
The tournament means so much to me as well as the things I do in Africa. I thought it could also work well together.
-
A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.
-
The sudden death of a partner while expecting a child is so universally understood as awful that I don't think anyone with any other weight to carry is going to get to same kind of sympathy - except perhaps people who lose a child.
-
What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs.
