Quotes from Robert Nozick's - The Examined Life

A Portrait vs. a Photograph

Why is it that no photograph of a person has a depth a painted portrait can have? The two embody different quantities of time. A photograph is a “snapshot,” whether or not it was posed; it shows one particular moment of time and what the person looked like right then, what his surface showed. During the extended hours a painting is sat for, though, its subject shows a range of traits, emotions, and thoughts, all revealed in differing lights. P.13

Focus

Still, when all other things are equal, the more concentrated thought goes into making something, the more it is shaped, enriched, and laden with significance. So too with living a life. P.14

The Purpose of Behaving Ethically

The philosophical tradition since Plato has sought to ground ethics by showing that our own well-being is served or enhanced by behaving ethically. P.16

What is our Purpose?

Does the desire somehow to survive physical death stem from the desire to have a larger purpose than we can find for ourselves on earth, another task we are to perform in another realm? We might think we each have the task here of making a soul for ourselves – souls might not be things we are born with – a task made more difficult by not knowing exactly what that soul is for. Perhaps it is more than our own individual souls we are to make, more even than a mosaic of souls together. P.25


Nozick, Robert. The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. 1989. First Simon & Schuster Paperbacks: United States.