Words matter. These are the best Julian Baggini Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.
Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone ‘just doing my job’ or the infernal self-checkout machine.
Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.
Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.
Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.
When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.
It’s not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don’t know what to do with them or can’t be bothered.
Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.
The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.
There are many things you shouldn’t measure. Don’t, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.
Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources.
Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.
Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.
True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.
Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.
Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.
The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why, when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow.
The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.
You don’t choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.
No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.
The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.
I don’t think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.
Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That’s why economics is not the dismal science, it’s no science at all.
We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome.
If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don’t have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn’t take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me.
Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.
The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.
From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.
When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning or changes for the worse.
Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.
Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like.
To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.
Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things.
No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can’t decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you’ve made in your life to date.
Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.
True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else – not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.
People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.
The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.
Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.
We can’t control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.
It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.
The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.
Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.
It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim ‘never say never’ is one of the most important in ethics.
The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.
The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.
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