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Thomas Nagel quotes
Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas Nagel
The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.
Thomas Nagel
If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
Thomas Nagel
We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed. ... What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action.
Thomas Nagel
Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
Thomas Nagel
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
Thomas Nagel
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
Thomas Nagel
Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.
Thomas Nagel
Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will-extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.
Thomas Nagel
I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
Thomas Nagel
I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
Thomas Nagel