Philosophy Quote by Daniel Quinn — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.”

“[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”

“[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.”

“If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.”

“...it doesn’t make any difference. Whether we’re being lied to or not, we still have to get up and go to work and pay the bills and all the rest.”

“In our work titled “On Nature and Against Method, Reflections & Propositions,” in Proposition XXXVII, we stated the following: The ancient Ionian thinkers and natural philosophers who had, in a sense, transformed into the fire of Heraclitus, namely the masters of the Milesian school, the cradle of civilization, await the reemergence of this Ionian vision, which we have described as a kind of reverie, within Blue Anatolia. Science, which is now struggling within a profound darkness of processes and risks coming to a complete standstill in its progress, may yet be revitalized by minds that will once again inherit and internalize the approaches of these Ionian thinkers toward nature. Today more than ever, there is a need for Thales’ water and magnetism, Anaximenes’ breath, Anaximander’s apeiron, Anaxagoras’ ordering mind, and Xenophanes of Colophon’s counter-awareness, his narratives, and his poetic sensibility.”

“J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.”

“You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.”

“We not only care about creatures subject to pain and suffering, we care about our own character. And that character expresses itself and develops itself--it refines itself--in just those settings in which even the wishes of others cannot defeat the principle that we take to be the grounding of our humanity.”