“Some people worry that to say we are nothing but matter is to deny that we think or feel. It’s not. The strange fact is that, when suitably arranged, matter thinks and feels.”

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 160

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Some people worry that to say we are nothing but matter is to deny that we think or feel. It’s not. The strange fact is…" by Steve Stewart-Williams?

Related quotes

Tanith Lee photo
Jeff Lindsay photo
Alexandre Dumas photo
Samuel Butler photo

“Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Sparks
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Context: Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.

Joseph Joubert photo

“To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Context: To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think. Everything we think must be thought with our entire being, body, and soul.

Maxine Waters photo

“That anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe. But whether other people feel this sort of awe, and whether they or I ought to is another question. I think we ought to.”

J. J. C. Smart (1920–2012) Australian philosopher and academic

The Existence of God, Church Quarterly Review, 156(319): 194 (1955).
Other quotes

Kim Stanley Robinson photo

“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) American science fiction writer

John Boone
Red Mars (1992)
Context: The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims with any number of points. But when their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y believes b. People then form their judgment on what they think of X and Y.

Related topics