Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Morton
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English philosopher Timothy Morton.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.
If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.
I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.
I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness - not just in terms of PR for the science.
The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.
Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.
It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.
Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.
When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.
Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.
The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present 'nowness': a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can't be tied to a specific timescale.
We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.
Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.
Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.
American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart - well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.
If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn't have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.
It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.
Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.
In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.
The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.
'Free speech' isn't speech at all if it's being used without listening, attention, or care.
Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?
The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.
We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.
Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.
Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
After a lifetime of listening to every Floyd album pretty much all the time - they're etched - 'Animals' is the one I can listen to again and again.
The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.
Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.
When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'
Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.
'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.
I'm the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.
I've managed to persuade Yoko Ono to put some of her work in my Penguin book!
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.
I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.
Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.
You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.
The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.
I love folding laundry.
I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.
I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I'm going to pour it everywhere.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy.
We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.
Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.
Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.
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