David Berman Quotes

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

Existence is self-enjoyment, by means of some object distinct from ourselves.

The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Reality is the completion of experience.

The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

To be is to be perceived

I know that I have lived because I have felt, and, feeling giving me the knowledge of my existence.

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them." "I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly. "Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.

'God himself cannot exist without wise men' - Luther said, and was right. But 'God can exist even less without unwise men' - that good old Luther did not say.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

Reality is only just a word.

Souls, I said. I mean, you always wonder if they're real. Even if you believe in them, you still have to wonder: Is my existence just this body? Is there really something more? Do I really have a soul?Uriel's smile blossomed again. You've got it backward, Harry, he said. You are a soul. You have a body.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

Nothing in this world is real

Nothing may truly be said to be a miracle except in the profound sense that everything is a miracle.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.