Andrew Marr > Andrew's Quotes

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“..."Nature" is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.”
― Martin Heidegger

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
― Henri Bergson

“Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.”
― Karl Popper

“How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?”
“Well," DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”
“But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester...”
“That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”
― John Barth, Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984 - 1994

“I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.”
― William T. Vollmann

“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor. ”
― Charles Willeford

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend

“Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method

“A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.”
― Paul Karl Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“There's so much to think about here in the world, one life is not enough for it all.”
― Olav H. Hauge, Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses

“Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.”
― John Hawkes

“Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine

“We make versions, and true versions make worlds.”
― Nelson Goodman

“We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.”
― Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis