LogFAQs > #973604772

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole Universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the Universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terrorThen I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

- Blaise Pascal

A purpose, an intention, a design, is evident in everything; and when our comprehension is so far enlarged as to contemplate the first rise of this visible system, we must adopt, with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or authorEven the contrarieties of nature, by discovering themselves everywhere, become proofs of some consistent plan, and establish one single purpose or intention, however inexplicable and incomprehensible.

- David Hume

In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings that throng, press, and toil, restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

If anything in the world is desirableit is that a ray of light should fall on the obscurity of our existence, and that we should obtain some information about this enigmatical life of ours, in which nothing is clear except its misery and vanityThe whole of experience is like a cryptograph, and philosophy is like the deciphering of it, and the correctness of this is confirmed by the continuity and connection that appear everywhere. If only this whole is grasped in sufficient depth, and inner experience is connected to outer, it must be capable of being interpreted, explained from itself.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

Man is a mystery. One must solve it. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky