Timothy Morton > Quotes

“The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“Being a person means never being sure that you're one.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“I call this double truth of a thing its fragility, the inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“The strategy of this book, then, is to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it. The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.”
― Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

“Personhood then is also in the mesh-- it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy -- for some, strangely or frighteningly easy -- to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.”
― Timothy Morton

“For beauty to work, there must be a surface capable of receiving the wound.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“I think that this music could liquefy my internal organs, make my ears bleed (this has actually occurred), send me into seizures. Perhaps it could kill me. To be killed by intensed beauty, what a Keatsian way to die.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee.”
― Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

“Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academig drag?”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colors on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? “A beautiful way to die” – to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“It's ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery.”
― Timothy Morton, Being Ecological

“We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of "real" and "thing" to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“When you see evil as a thing apart from yourself "over there," you can fly a plane into it or destroy it with a powerful bomb. You can justify murder. Evil is the gaze that sees evil as a thing apart from me.”
― Timothy Morton, Being Ecological

“The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought

“Nature is…animals, trees, the weather…the bioregion, the ecosystem. It is both the set and the contents of the set. It is the world and the entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon…Nature.”
― Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

“Perhaps indifference itself is pointing to a way to care for humans and nonhumans in a less violent way- simply allowing them to exist, like pieces of paper in your hand, like a story you might appreciate- or not- for no reason.”
― Timothy Morton, Being Ecological

“The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal of the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don't know. When we share it with other, it's as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with knowing look. But it's impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“Wholes subscend their parts, which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible. It is good to regard things such as capitalism as physical beings, not simply as fictions that would disappear if we just stopped believing in them. But what kind of physical beings are they? If they are susbcendent, it means that we can change them, if we want. What if some things could be physically huge, yet ontologically tiny? What if neoliberalism, which envelopes Earth in misery, were actually quite small in another way, and thus strangely easy to subvert? Too easy for intellectuals, who want to make everything seem difficult so they can keep themselves in a job by explaining it, or outdo each other in competition for whose picture of the world is more depressing. „I am more intelligent than you because my picture of neoliberalism is far more terrifying and encompassing than yours. We are truly enslaved in my vision, with no hope of escape – therefore I am superior to you!” Isn’t this a tragic consequence of what some call cynical reason, the dominant way of being right for the last two hundred years?”
― Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

“We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But what you did will have huge consequences. This is the paradox of the ecological age. And it is why action to change global warming must be massive and collective.”
― Timothy Morton, Being Ecological

“Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it.”
― Timothy Morton, Realist Magic

“Maybe beauty is death, in a way, just like the decadent aesthetes used to say. It's a reminder that things are fragile, because when one thing envelopes another thing, that other thing might be overwhelmed or destroyed.”
― Timothy Morton, Being Ecological