Philip K. Dick Quotes

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

To be is to do - Socrates To do is to be - Sartre Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

There is no frontier between being and appearing.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.

We are what we seem to be.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

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 Pirandello had something to say to people about what truth really is.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy.

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

I think, therefore I am.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

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?