Kiselm's submitted quotes
Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so it often takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become.
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.
Some philosophers can`t bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don`t go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
We are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.
If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.