Best 11 quotes of Jennifer Michael Hecht on MyQuotes

A reasonable scale of probability-what is likely-forbids believing a whole range of imaginative possibilities, even though we do not know anything for sure.

How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.

If you look at a testimony of love from 2,000 years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago is ridiculous.

Like belief, doubt takes a lot of different forms, from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.

Lucian [of Samosata; 120-190 CE] was trying to make his audience laugh, rather than start a revolution

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

Your staying alive means so much more than you really know, or that anyone is aware of at this moment.

[Based upon the message of "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes,] If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan.

History Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild and wished to trade-in all of Eden to have but been a child. In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace, that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place.

Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.

Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetched, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disappear from existence in the blink of a cosmic eye, so why bother to tell this perhaps illusory and possibly un-listening person something he or she is unlikely to truly understand, just before the two of you blip back out of existence? We like to talk to people who answer us, intelligently if possible, but we do talk without needing response or expecting comprehension. Sometimes, the event is the word, the act of speaking. Once we pull that apart a bit, the action of talking becomes more important than the question of whether the talking is working-because we know, going in, that the talking is not working. That said, one might as well pray.