Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

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

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

It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.