Luc Ferry Quotes & Sayings

Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.
(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25) — Luc Ferry

The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing. — Luc Ferry

True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world. — Luc Ferry

The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. (...)
Yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories, and aspirations, nostalgia and expectations. — Luc Ferry

The Gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered. — Luc Ferry

..the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past- the home of
nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, the great spoilers of happiness. — Luc Ferry

The world is a chaos, an irreducible plurality of forces, instincts and drives which ceaselessly clash. — Luc Ferry

death means everything that is unrepeatable. Death is, in the midst of life, that which will not return; that which belongs irreversibly to time past, which we have no hope of ever recovering. — Luc Ferry

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'. — Luc Ferry