Quote by Jim Holt

“Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.”

— Jim Holt

You have to have a temperamental attraction to dangerous ideas.

— Jim Holt

Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common…

— Jim Holt

“(It is interesting that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetic” have the same root, the Greek word for “adornment” or “arrangement.”)”

— Jim Holt

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.

— Jim Holt

When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.

— Jim Holt

“To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately…

— Jim Holt

“In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic.…

— Jim Holt

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

— Jim Holt

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a…

— Jim Holt

“I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a…

— Jim Holt

It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a…

— Jim Holt