Quotes from Bryan Magee

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

I have very strongly this feeling that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like.

Although it may be disconcerting to find that something you have believed is mistaken, it is at the same time thrilling, because it opens up new worlds of re-evaluation and fresh thinking, new understanding and insight.

Something else I learnt...is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it--conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest...

Even if it could be shown that all explanations can be reduced ultimately to those of science, and even if all the reductions were then to be carried out, the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning.

Analytic philosophy is an intellectual pastime for people who are clever but do not want to think seriously.

There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.