Michael Novak Quotes

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

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

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.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

I really believe that 'Saw' makes us stop and think and question our motives and what we're doing here on Earth.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe.

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

Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.

I'm very passionate about philosophy and religion.

I took all the philosophy courses I could.

Philosophy changes day by day.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

This planet Earth, the act of putting a roof over our heads, our flesh and blood existence, it's all very temporary.