Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

Read in order to live.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

If you want the meaning of families and life and religion and philosophy rolled into one package, all you need to read is 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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?

I like the big questions.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.