Neil Gaiman and Philosophy Quotes

“Part of the system by which we have traditionally given meaning to our lives comes from a belief in teleology—the belief that our life story is going somewhere in a particular, understandable direction.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“the naming of people and things is done in the absence of true self-knowledge in order to allow those objects and people to know what and who they are.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“(although he admits that the Platonic Forms could very well apply to non-mathematical objects as well, such as aesthetics and morality, or, presumably, television and lightning and Egyptians with carnivorous genitalia).”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“delivered in film, we would hear the actor say “Liberty—someone could slip on that. Break his neck.” Liberty is double-edged; the freedom to succeed is also the freedom to fail.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“Religion is an operating system for dealing with the world, and, like other operating systems, religions need updates to stay compatible with new software and hardware.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“The only ‘goal’ we can speak of with reference to adaptation is species survival. . . . This does not mean that everyone has to understand everything or that understanding is a logically water-tight, foolproof system. All it has to be is good enough. (p. 301, Spolsky’s italics)”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“The tourist believes himself or herself to be the center of the universe, the new location merely a novelty to be toyed with before returning home unaltered. The traveler, on the other hand, engages and is transformed.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

“Travel writing is, at its heart, about exploration and discovery, how finding the strange and new invites reflection.”
― Tracy L. Bealer, Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!