top of page
"We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Philosophy quotes

"I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class"

"You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world."

"In the equation of life, the limit does not exist."

"When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children"

"Think independently and critically, but never forget to think with understanding and love."

"The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness."

"If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything."

"There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God."

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation"

"The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did."
Explore more quotes by Yann Martel

"You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better."

"To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken."

"Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer."

"When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival."

"What is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than to shine at practicalities - the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net of there's so little fish to catch?"

"The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips...I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing."

"Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap."

"For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart."
bottom of page