Pliny the Elder Quotes

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

I kind of feel, in a way, all of us will forever be asking those questions of ourselves: Who am I and how do I fit in in the world and what is all this about? Because those aren't really... there are no answers to those questions, in a sense.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

There are moments when your mind is very vulnerable. You feel a lot of doubts.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Human beings are not capable of creating a thought that truly conceives of this existence. Nobody knows if we are really here, alive, or anything. It's a mystery.

People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet.

I'm never confident about anything, especially with law.

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.

The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out.

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly familiar and trustworthily physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we realize that we are like shipwrecked people trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whether they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment.

It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.

I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

For me now, what I've come to is, we don't know anything.

It's hard to speculate as a human about the afterlife because you're not in it. And it's probably as wild and wacky as you could imagine. The idea that people have figured it out, I'm not sure if I can fathom that.

From all our observations we may collect with certainty, that misery is the lot of man, but cannot discover in what particular condition it will find most alleviations.

Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order?

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.