19 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Philosophy

Orson Scott Card quotes on philosophy

5. Even if there's no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or god made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you.

88. Order and disorder, they each have their beauty

134. It told us that death means something completely different to them. If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart... So righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn't it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?

175. If you act as the enemy of life, then life will become your enemy.

213. Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life.

235. How do we remember? Is the brain a jar that holds our memories? Then when we die, does the jar break? Are our memories spilled on the ground and lost? Or is the brain a map that leads down twisted paths and into hidden corners? Then when we die, the map is lost but perhaps some explorer could wander through that strange landscape and find out the hiding places of our misplaced memories.

277. As if the universe were created to serve him, with all the people in it tuned to resonate his desires

281. You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false

537. Alvin wondered if it was true - if all men had evil in their hearts, and those men as were good, maybe they were simply the ones who controlled theirselves so well they could act contrary to their heart's desire. But if that were so, then no man was good, not one

644. Why am I so certain of my doubt? What? why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers

650. Imitation of life. Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most

656. I wasn't a believer' I was raised that way, but when [she] died I decided that was all the proof I needed that god didn't exist or if he did he didn't care about us at all

691. I don't care what you do to a box, it's still a box

775. How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than I clean, painless death?

879. I walked down the hill, forgot philosophy, and joined the human race again. Nobody was particularly glad to see me

955. What is reality?

1047. The opposite. I love only life. But life can only continue in the face of death. (The Worthing Saga)

1054. ...But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart. Speaker for the Dead

1073. Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life. -Children of the Mind