Thomas Nagel

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.

Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.

The external view [of agency] forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

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.

The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?

Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.

If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.

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.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.

A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.