Philosophical Themes Quotes

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

One of the most beautiful things about Shakespeare's Hamlet is when he stops in the middle of the play to ask, 'To be or not to be?' Then, right at the end, he decides to 'let be.' The first season of 'Stranger Things' was Hopper asking whether 'to be or not to be' and the second is to 'let be.'

There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine.

'The Marriage of Souls', like 'The Rationalist', is an exploration of humanist philosophy wrapped between the delicate leaves of an eighteenth-century tale. The story of the two novels - and they should be read as a two-volume work - centres around the old war-horse of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. But what a boy and what a girl.

Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.

I remember reading Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot' in my grandmother's Moscow apartment and feeling this call to be a better person.

One friend said, "Donnie Darko movie was weird!" And I thought, "Hmm. I don't think we're as good of friends as I thought." It's not like I disliked him for it; it just meant we weren't on the same page I thought we were. Because I can't imagine watching that film and not being moved to tears.

I love The Matrix, especially the first one.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

In adopting the form of the adventure novel, Wells deepened it, raised its intellectual value, and brought into it elements of social philosophy and science. In his own field - though, of course, on a proportionately lesser scale - Wells may be likened to Dostoyevsky, who took the form of the cheap detective novel and infused it with brilliant psychological analysis.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Abstract qualities begin With capitals alway: The True, the Good, the Beautiful- Those are the things that pay!

Georgian film is a completely unique phenomenon, vivid, philosophically inspiring, very wise, childlike. There is everything that can make me cry and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing.

'Fringe' is a sci-fi show. But once you go beyond the genre, you're immersed in a profound reality.

The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.

Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.

To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.

The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing; its contents are a fiction, conceived for the purpose of explaining the different opinions which people hold on Divine Providence. ...This fiction, however, is in so far different from other fictions that it includes profound ideas and great mysteries, removes great doubts, and reveals the most important truths. I will discuss it as fully as possible; and I will also tell you the words of our Sages that suggested to me the explanation of this great poem.

Religion, Society, and Nature--these are the three struggles of man.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

'The Last Airbender' is genetically engineered for me. I love martial arts. I study it. The movie's based on a lot of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. I was raised Hindu.

When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.