'The way in which we think our ourselves - the picture we form of our essential nature - directly affects the way we live.' -Heart and Mind

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.

-Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley - 'Machines, however clever, are not people, and we should not pretend they are.'

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.--Mary Midgley

Midgley Quotes
'We want incompatible things, and we want them badly. We are fairly aggressive, yet we want company and depend on long-term enterprises. We are restlessly curious, yet long for permanence. We cannot live without a culture, but it never quite satisfied us'

'What bias, then, is now misleading us? I am suggesting that it is an unbridled, exaggerated individualism, taken for granted as much by the left as by the right--an unrealistic acceptance of competitiveness as central to human nature.' -Evolution as a Religion

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.--Mary Midgley

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.--Mary Midgley

'Obsessed with success, with examinations, tests, and record-breaking, with competitive sport, trade, and manufacture, we have drifted into behaving as if life were not worth living except at the top of the dominance hierarchy.' -Beast and Man

'Although each of us often needs solitude, in our essence we are not totally separate beings. At heart we are both separate and joined, and the interaction between these two conditions is what gives us both most of our joys and most of our problems.' -The Solitary Self

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.--Mary Midgley

“Common standards, common ideals, common tastes, common priorities that make a common morality possible, rest on shared joys and sorrows & all require active sympathy” ❤️‍🩹

Midgley Quotes 1990 on social animals & morality

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it.--Mary Midgley

'Our need for each other – our need for all the normal intercourse of human life – is not a weakness but a strength...Of course our dependencies are dangerous, but who wants to live safely like a billiard ball or a doll that never leaves its package?' -The Solitary Self