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

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

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

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

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

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.

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.