Solipsism Quotes

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I am my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“True freedom is solipsism. True freedom is believing that the world will cease to exist the moment you die. True freedom is realizing that only you have free will, while the others are mere puppets, hive minds. True freedom is, therefore, nothing less than insanity.”
― Abhaidev, The Meaninglessness of Meaning

“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

Well, so I will talk about myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.”
― Samuel Butler

“And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.
Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,
But if I weren’t in the world,
The world would be different —
There would be me the less —
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.

(7/10/1930)”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

“The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a
solipsist.”
― Kedar Joshi

“He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”

Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”
― Iain M. Banks, Matter

“Every morning, the newspapers are crammed full of human-interest stories, and on television we see one human after another. When animals do make an occasional appearance, they are ascribed human characteristics to make them palatable. And people only talk about themselves. Even if the subject is natural phenomena like earthquakes, tsunamis or cherry blossoms coming into full bloom, everything is seen in terms of the impact on people. Nothing delights people more than to talk about people dying or being killed.”
― Yukio Mishima, Beautiful Star

“The incomparable Nostromo, the Capataz, the respected and feared Captain Fidanza, the unquestioned patron of secret societies, a republican like old Giorgio, and a revolutionist at heart (but in another manner), was on the point of jumping overboard from the deck of his own schooner. That man, subjective almost to insanity, looked suicide deliberately in the face. But he never lost his head. He was checked by the thought that this was no escape. He imagined himself dead, and the disgrace, the shame going on. Or, rather, properly speaking, he could not imagine himself dead. He was possessed too strongly by the sense of his own existence, a thing of infinite duration in its changes, to grasp the notion of finality. The earth goes on for ever.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“My stint as a Sheeptilian solipsistic prophet began in an innocuous manner, but quickly spiraled into something that was out of control and very dangerous. I never foresaw that I’d become a fundamentalist extremist. The journey was unique and opened my mind to the possibilities that the Word of Shiligoth was a literal springboard and historical account of all life.”
― Aaron Kyle Andresen, How Dad Found Himself in the Padded Room: A Bipolar Father's Gift For The World

“...and inoffensive. She [the pet rabbit] particularly enjoyed sitting in the center of the kitchen table and from that spot would regard Ace, Esther and Hoffman gravely. Bonnie had a feline manner.
"Will she always be this judgmental?" Esther wanted to know.
Bonnie became more canine when she was allowed outdoors. She would sleep on the porch, lying on her side in a patch of sun, and if...”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Famous Torn and Restored Lit Cigarette Trick

“we cannot war on despair”
― Mort Rosenblum, Escaping Plato's Cave: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival

“Solipsism, the theory that only one mind exists and that what appears to be external reality is only a dream taking place in that mind, cannot be logically disproved.”
― David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

“The media are a criminal organization that uses advanced undiscovered technology to abuse their targets into trapping them do phenomenal crimes that are actually false reality in order to protect the real criminals, those they cover and present to you as innocents.”
― Maria Karvouni, You Are Always Innocent

“If there are signs. If, in the next cell an impossible neighbor, because on the other side of the wall are just the cliffs and sea, starts to tap to give you an escape plan with crescents, gears, triangles and crosses. If life is a test of perspicacity, or, what might be one in the same of personality - draw a tree, draw a person. Put these drawings in the order they occurred. Interpret the multicolored butterflies spread over the page. They must appear from where you least expected. Heteroclite and elusive above all, making you doubt not them but yourself. Making you blush before your own paranoia. And making you try to forget it. To return to the pervasive conspiracy of normality.

But the tapping on the wall won’t let you sleep. And the privation of sleep leads to hallucinations and insanity. And in the end, inevitably, to the illusion that you hear tapping on the wall. And all this until the metronome stops. And you have yet to give an answer.”
― Cărtărescu Mircea

“We Jews like to believe Judaism can stand on it's own, not just a pillar of Christianity.”
― Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture

“English: "The manner of clouding our past interiority is similar to the manner of clouding the interiority of others."

Česky: „Způsob zamlžení našeho minulého nitra se podobá způsobu zamlžení nitra ostatních.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“All that is human melted into the sky and faded into the mountains. Is that a paradox? That a man could never need or have better companionship than himself? As for the solitary confinement of the mind, that solipsism, like the other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is the product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book and smoke-hilled coffeehouses, bad for the brains, and conversation-clogged seminars.

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist, all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head. If he ducks, he’s a liar. His logic may be airtight, but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Humanity?" cried Port. "What's that? Who is humanity? I'll tell you. Humanity is everyone but one's self. So of what interest can it possibly be to anybody?"
Tunner said slowly: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'd like to take issue with you on that. I'd say humanity is you, and that's just what makes it interesting.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“If our senses can so easily deceive us, how can we be confident in our understanding of anything, even our own physical existence?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality