Top 60 Thomas Nagel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

— Thomas Nagel

2. “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.”

— Thomas Nagel

3. “What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?”

— Thomas Nagel

4. “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

— Thomas Nagel

5. “Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.”

— Thomas Nagel

6. “I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.”

— Thomas Nagel

7. “Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

— Thomas Nagel

8. “Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”

— Thomas Nagel

9. “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”

— Thomas Nagel

10. “If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.”

— Thomas Nagel

11. “Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.”

— Thomas Nagel

12. “Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.”

— Thomas Nagel

13. “Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical – that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental...”

— Thomas Nagel

14. “The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.”

— Thomas Nagel

15. “The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.”

— Thomas Nagel

16. “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”

— Thomas Nagel

17. “The most radical conclusion to draw from this would be that your mind is the only thing that exists.”

— Thomas Nagel

18. “If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.”

— Thomas Nagel

19. “To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.”

— Thomas Nagel

20. “In either case, natural teleology would mean that the universe is rationally governed in more than one way – not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes – notably, the existence of living, and ultimately of conscious, organisms.”

— Thomas Nagel

21. “It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”

— Thomas Nagel

22. “Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.”

— Thomas Nagel

23. “If you can’t prove that anything exists outside you own mind, is it all right to go on believing in the external world anyway?”

— Thomas Nagel

24. “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.”

— Thomas Nagel

25. “To put it schematically, the claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.”

— Thomas Nagel

26. “Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.”

— Thomas Nagel

27. “A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.”

— Thomas Nagel

28. “I’m not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.”

— Thomas Nagel

29. “The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality, and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and numbers.”

— Thomas Nagel

30. “Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.”

— Thomas Nagel

31. “Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.”

— Thomas Nagel

32. “Even if we acknowledge the existence of distinct and irreducible perspectives, the wish for a unified conception of the world doesn’t go away. If we can’t achieve it in a form that eliminates individual perspectives, we may inquire to what extent it can be achieved if we admit them.”

— Thomas Nagel

33. “If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.”

— Thomas Nagel

34. “There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.”

— Thomas Nagel

35. “Physical science has progressed by leaving the mind out of what it tries to explain, but there may be more to the world than can be understood by physical science.”

— Thomas Nagel

36. “Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.”

— Thomas Nagel

37. “In every area of thought we must rely ultimately on our judgments, tested by reflection, subject to correction by the counterarguments of others, modified by the imagination and by comparison with alternatives.”

— Thomas Nagel

38. “Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine – that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law – cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.”

— Thomas Nagel

39. “Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.”

— Thomas Nagel

40. “Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.”

— Thomas Nagel

41. “The question is there, whther we answer it or not.”

— Thomas Nagel

42. “The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves.”

— Thomas Nagel

43. “It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps.”

— Thomas Nagel

44. “I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.”

— Thomas Nagel

45. “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.”

— Thomas Nagel

46. “My skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.”

— Thomas Nagel

47. “The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.”

— Thomas Nagel

48. “To deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.”

— Thomas Nagel

49. “A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.”

— Thomas Nagel

50. “I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.”

— Thomas Nagel