John Gardner Quotes

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

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

I think; therefore, I am the center of the universe.

It's possible - you can never know - that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

None of us exist in a world that is the same world that any of the rest of us live in. The world that's important is the world behind each of our eyes, which is something that none of the rest of us can access.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

I think we all see the world from our own little unique bubble.

It's easier to be skeptical because it's easier to understand that every human lives in their own world.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it, there is no value, - and if there were, it would be of no value.

Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.

And allow the world as others choose to see it, exist as well.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Does the universe exist only for me? It's possible. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.