Eric Maisel Quotes

We are on the threshold of understanding a shining idea: that each life can have meaning, even if the universe has none.

Human beings have always had the potential to know meaninglessness. Modern times activated that potential.

We have not answered the free will-determinism question, but we have decided to come down on the side of personal freedom, to assert it whether or not it exists. Just as we make our own meaning, we make our own freedom. If this is a cosmic joke, then let us be the ones laughing.

The universe does not care about fairness; nevertheless, you may decide that you would like to advocate for fairness.

To be ethical is to make ethics, not to mouth ethics.

This looks to be a moment when atheism is capturing the imagination of many millions of people. At exactly the same time, fundamental religious belief is growing unchecked. These two events are likely intimately related, as rational people are frightened back to their rationality by fundamentalism and believers dig in harder against liberty, justice, and reason.

The atheist’s way is your way. You will take your journey, and it will not be identical to my journey.

We respect science because it tests its hypotheses. We respect ourselves when we do the same.

It requires your constant analyses because all meaning is subjective: the only way you can opt for settled meaning, objective meaning, or received meaning is by giving away your freedom.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there are no gods. We arise from nature—and nature is not a moral entity.

You nominate yourself to be the one who will courageously do what you think ought to be done, even if everyone is pressing you to do something else.

Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them. This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you … refuse to engage in the process of personal meaning-making, with its requirements of honesty and self-awareness.

Not only is the atheist way more accurate and more truthful than the god-talk way, but it also confers great advantages. The first is that you feel very free. You are free to think your own thoughts and to have your own feelings. If a passing pastor accuses you of sinning, you feel free to rebuke or ignore him. You know that he has no special knowledge and that he is only betraying your common humanity by quoting gods. You know that no one has any special knowledge about the purpose or lack of purpose of the universe, that there is only scientific knowledge, with its limitations; the speculations of consciousness, with its limitations; and some amount of mystery, shared by us all and quite likely to remain unexplained until the end of time.

It is simply not true that atheists, because of their convictions and their worldview, are as a group more depressed than believers.

Every time that we say that God is the author of some phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant of how such a phenomenon was caused by the forces of nature.