32 Quotes by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Aurelius says that one reason it doesn’t matter how long you live is that this is not theatre, that the whole is not the thing. Each moment is the thing. “The soul obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as... in a play... where the whole action is incomplete if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, ‘I have what is my own.

Epistemology is still a central issue in philosophy, and we moderns are particularly vexed with the question of how we can come to know anything outside what we already know, that is, how we can climb out of our own culture’s basic assumptions, and how we can hope to see beyond our brains’ basic formation.

Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it. So long as you can possibly worry about it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Here one does not use logic to conquer chaos. Rather, one uses logic because the logic itself is beauty, is truth. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. Contemporaries did not know what to call a thing like that – he questioned their every faith, their every way of life – so they called it atheism.

A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food’s contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied.

I draw from the absurd three consequences. Which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.

When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.

It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.