#solipsism

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #solipsism




The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.


David Foster Wallace


#capitalism #consumerism #dfw #solipsism #dreams

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.


Ian Mcewan


#equality

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.


Samuel Butler


#poetry #solipsism #metaphysics

Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either--he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days--since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other--with, of course, a day off each year for sheer solipsist debauchery.


Robert A. Heinlein


#hypotheses #indecision #paradoxes #solipsism #the-universe

A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging[...] in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist[...] A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of itself.


David Foster Wallace


#life

I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.


Christopher Hitchens


#arrogance #atheism #modesty #religion #solipsism

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.


Ursula K. Le Guin


#humanity #imagination #loneliness #poetry #solipsism

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.


David Foster Wallace


#norman-mailer #philip-roth #solipsism #beauty

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.


David Foster Wallace


#john-updike #solipsism #death

The stumbling block will turn out to be the traditional one for students of consciousness: the flashlight is incapable of shining on itself, so we can't trust what its light reveals.


Jonathan Lethem


#music