Thomas Nagel said this quote

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

~ Thomas Nagel

Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds, and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.

~ Thomas Nagel

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

~ Thomas Nagel

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

~ Thomas Nagel