Philosophy Quote by Kurt Vonnegut — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . .”

“I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.”

“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”

“There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”

“The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.”

“If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.”

“where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?”

“But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.”

“The source of man's rights is not divine law or a congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A ___ and man is man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product for his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational”