So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding.

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.

Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

It may be hyperbolic to declare that Shakespeare teaches us more about being human than all the natural scientists combined.

The "little theme" from Vinteuil, heard by Swann as emblematic of his love for Odette, remains a point of reference for him, as the character of that love changes and as the love eventually fades.

Science literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life.

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are?

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.")

You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.

All of us, the great and the little have need of each other.

I knew a man who had been virtually drowned and then revived. He said that his death had not been painful.

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.

Life is too short and hell is too hot to just play church.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables