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

“[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.”

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.”

“No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.”

“This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.”

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”

“You can't just skip the boring parts.”

“...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”

“Steve's throat swelled with tension as the intimacy of the moment became more tangible. He moved his eyes from the dark, reflective river, to the dark, reflective pupils in Diane's eyes. They seemed to quiver with tenderness - but then they would grow distant. He found himself continually surprised at the "aliveness" of the person standing just a foot away from him now. She wasn't inanimate: she would flinch if he pinched her, and answer if he asked her. And she was beautiful." -- From "The Grand Unified Story" -- a short story in Zack Love's Stories and Scripts: an Anthology”

“I only seem negative to the fortunate. That's because I show the less fortunate that they aren't less fortunate after all.”

“A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.”