Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Morton - Page 2

Bohm's 'ontological interpretation' was so called because of the bad rap the word 'ontology' has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.

In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.

I always knew Andy Hageman would publish incredible eco stuff.

The Left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity.

I like being irritating.

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference - just with some kind of open care.

If you're applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.

Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That's a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.

It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.

Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.

An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.

'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'

A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.

Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.

Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You've been involved in the most introverted process you've ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.

I try to have little or no alcohol when I go to a big conference. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that stuff can regress you really fast, and this is not a good place to regress.

If you're facing rejection right now, it's very important to realize, especially in a down market, that it's not personal. Really. Truly. The indifference of the system is also crushing. But perhaps it's better than thinking that someone was out to get you.

When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation.

Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?

I discover in my experiential space evidence for the wrongness of solipsism, and this evidence is called beauty.

An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.

In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.

I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.

In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.

Spending some money on the you who is going to get a job is essential.

'Humankind' is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.

A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.

OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.

I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters in it - a few years into having a job, I burned it.

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

Paradoxically, capital has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.