Philip Kitcher Quotes

Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war.

At this very moment in time there will be people making, breaking relationships, regretting deeply what they've done, and causing hurt, but that is a fact of life, and if we weren't full of emotion, we'd be automatons, and I don't think people want us to be that.

Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you're doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else... The emotional life is all the same.

What better book can there be than the book of humanity.

In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.

- and you are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.

If you ain’t scared… you ain’t human.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Anything's possible in Human Nature ...Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

Whatever capacities there may be for enjoyment or for suffering in this strange being of ours, and God only knows what they are, they will be drawn out wholly in accordance with character.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

Mankind is a science that defies definitions.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, comedy, farce, or tragedy, by a dramatis personae, the 'self', and so it will be until the curtain drops.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

Any great movie you watch has some element of darkness or loss or some suffering in it. That's what makes the fun parts fun.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.