Quotes from Julian Baggini

A bird gives a cry–the mountains quiet all the more.' 49 (This is also perhaps the real meaning behind Hakuin Ekaku's famous eighteenth-century-BCE koan 'What is the Sound of the Single Hand?': it is an invitation to attend to the silence, the emptiness.

If we live with a good heart, good speech, and good action life will be good.

What the rise of religions did was to give a name to a set of beliefs (atheism) that had always existed but which was considered so unexceptional that it required no special label.

It is intuitively plausible that if something has endured for centuries, there must be something in it. But on that logic, there must be something in slavery and the inequality of women.

Because truths stand or fall together, it is not possible to put ourselves outside two webs of belief and assess their credibility from a third, neutral perspective.

The beliefs of atheists would have to require at least as much faith as those of religious believers. But they don't.

Atheism is not a faith position because it is belief in nothing beyond that which is supported by evidence and argument. Religious belief is a faith position because it goes beyond what there is evidence or argument for. That is why faith requires something 'special' that ordinary belief does not have.

After all, people previously invoked God to explain all sorts of natural phenomena we later explained, and each time God had to retreat further back into the unknown. Today God is often found retreating to lighting the blue touch-paper that started the universe going or fine-tuning its fundamental forces. Such a God is fast running out of places to refuge.

The problem of induction is the problem of how an argument can be good reasoning as induction but be poor reasoning as a deduction.

if there were no theists, there wouldn't even be any atheists.

The central riddle I've set out to solve concerns the self's continuity in change: how can we remain the same people over time, even as we change, sometimes considerably?

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.

Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.

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.

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.

It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really are.