Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

— Thomas Nagel

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

— Thomas Nagel

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

— Thomas Nagel

I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. To avoid the mistake that White finds in the hypothesis of nonintentional bias, teleology would have to be restrictive in what it makes likely, but without depending on intentions or motives. This would probably have to involve some conception of an increase in value through the expanded possibilities provided by the higher forms of organization toward which nature tends: not just any outcome could qualify as a tells. That would make value an explanatory end, but not one that is realized through the purposes or intentions of an agent. Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are "biased toward the marvelous".

— Thomas Nagel

I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement....

— Thomas Nagel

I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory between them.

— Thomas Nagel

If we tried to rely entirely on reason and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse – a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

— Thomas Nagel

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

— Thomas Nagel

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truth of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

— Thomas Nagel

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t things as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.

— Thomas Nagel