Christopher Isherwood Quotes

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

Yeah, well my name is Bai Ling. That means white spirit, and I really feel like sometimes I'm not existing.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

To believe that mind is all, that thought is all is only a higher materialism.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are.

In fact, I don't even know myself. That is the big secret of the story. That there is no story.

I can't even make a leap of faith to believe in my own existence.

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

Thank you, but I'm afraid I can't accept your compliment. You see, I'm an atheist, so if I'm also God, that would mean that I don't believe in myself, and at this point in my life, I don't need the added insecurity.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

I wore Nietzsche's eyes. Now that I step back to see, I haven't been me.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

I think God is something that people use to avoid reality. I think faith allows people to reject what is right in front of our eyes, which is that thing, this life, this existence, this consciousness, or whatever word you want to use for it, is all we have, and all we'll ever have. I think people have faith because they want and need to believe in something, whatever that something is, because life can be hard and depressing and brutal if you don't.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

When I learned that there was such a thing as an atheist, I looked it up - and found out that the definition fitted me to a tee. Finally, at the age of 24, I found out who and what I was. Better late than never.