Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.
Thomas NagelRead
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that human behavior can be influenced by a strong will, regardless of one's personal flaws.
Thomas Nagel's quote reflects the complexity of human nature, highlighting that despite possessing negative traits such as greed or envy, individuals can still harness their willpower to act nobly. It suggests that actions are a product of conscious choice and awareness, indicating that the potential for good exists within everyone, even if their character has shortcomings.
Themes
WillpowerBehaviorHuman NatureCharacterChoice
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal flaws.
More from Thomas Nagel
All quotes →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.
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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. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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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.
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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.
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