Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
Jim Holt
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.”
“In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”
“Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.”
“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
“I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.”
“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
“It has even been conjectured that the human mind plays a critical role in the self-causing mechanism. Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos, it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole. On this picture, sometimes called the “participatory universe,” reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world.”
“I would earnestly warn you against trying to find out the reason for and explanation of everything. . . . To try and find out the reason for everything is very dangerous and leads to nothing but disappointment and dissatisfaction, unsettling your mind and in the end making you miserable. —QUEEN”
“(It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”)”
“Our mild anxiety about the precariousness of being may give way to confidence in a world that turns out to be coherent, luminous, and intellectually secure. Or it might yield to cosmic terror when we realize that the whole show is a mere ontological soap bubble that could pop into nothingness at any moment, without the slightest warning. And our present sense of the potential reach of human thought may give way to a newfound humility at its limits, or to a newfound wonder at its leaps and bounds—or a bit of both.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
nirvana, existentialism, self, philosophy
