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The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

Matter is a term contrary to soul. But nonsoul is its contradictory. Whatever is not soul is nonsoul.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body.

The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.

Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.