top of page
"I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I'll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I'll feel resentful because it'll feel as I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Philosophy quotes

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

"Our life on earth is and ought to be material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly they are still entangled with the desire for ownership."

"A philosopher is a lover and searcher of truth, beauty, meaning, and wisdom."

"There is nothing wrong or right, only our thoughts make it so."

"I can resist everything but love."

"Opinion about religion might be different, but religion should be one and that is the well being of humanity."

"You may not be rich with money, Socrates was not, your life still has tremendous value."

"You are the center of your universe, without you nothing is there."

"Fear is the chain still wrapped around a free man's leg."

"The role of a philosopher is to create a better way for the future generations."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman

"As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms."

"I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike 'identity', must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ('gay', 'black', 'Muslim', whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity."

"Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn't worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!"

"What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism."

"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing."

"And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."

"All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?"

"I'm working on another Lyra book right now " it's called The Book of Dust.'It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'."

"The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it."
bottom of page