JCJBergman

“Healthy, normal people cannot experience either agony or death. They live as if life had a definitive character. It is an integral part of normal people's superficial equilibrium to take life as absolutely independent from death and to objectify death as a reality transcending life. That's why they perceive death as coming from the outside, not as an inner fatality of life itself. One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. Metaphysical revelations begin only when one's superficial equilibrium starts to totter and a painful struggle is substituted for naive spontaneity. The premonition of death is so rare in average people that one can can practically say that it does not exist. The fact that the presentiment of death appears only when life is shaken to its foundations proves beyond doubt the immanence of death in life. An insight into these depths shows us how illusory is the belief in life's integrity and how well founded the belief in a metaphysical substratum of demonism.”
― Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“The fact that entangled particles can influence each other faster than the speed of light is taken as proof that there is a spiritual domain of instant communication outside material reality; the fact that a wave function collapses into reality through observation is interpreted as a proof that observation creates reality... no wonder many podcasts claim that quantum mechanics proves material reality is a simulacrum, that all there is, is spirit, etc.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy

“I can doubt that the world really exists, but I cannot doubt that I have intentional consciousness, since doubt is itself a form of conscious intention.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“As Raymond Martin has put it: 'When it comes to understanding the past, historians are the acknowledged experts. But when it comes to understanding how we understand the past, there are no experts.' The American apostle of quantitative history Robert Fogel declares somewhat gloomily in the light of all this, that historians have a choice: 'Either they ignore the philosophers and get on with what they are doing, but that might mean that they will continue to work without understanding how they are doing it. Or they down tools to listen to the philosophers, but this will most likely mean that tools will stay permanently drowned.' But this counsel of despair is belied by the numerous examples of practicing historians who have managed to do both. [...] The more this happens, the better.”
― Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History