Daniel Dennett

I love the world so much that I am sure I want to know the truth about it.

We don`t love babies and puppies because they`re cute. It`s the other way around: we see them as cute because evolution has designed us to love things that look like that.

Religion, like love and music, is natural. But so are smoking, war, and death.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Sometimes an impossibility in fact is theoretically more interesting than a possibility in principle.

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear.

We are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Some philosophers can`t bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don`t go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so it often takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.