Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.
Julian Baggini
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Whatever
Governed
Point
Persuasion
Universe
Misfortunes
Force
Explain
Much
Forces
Believe
Misery
World
Religious
Benign
Suffering
Misfortune
More quotes by Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.
Julian Baggini
If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
Julian Baggini
Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.
Julian Baggini
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Julian Baggini
I am only me for practical purposes.
Julian Baggini
When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable.
Julian Baggini
Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
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.
Julian Baggini
The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
Julian Baggini