Mary Midgley Quotes & Sayings

Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started. — Mary Midgley

The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world. — Mary Midgley

Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated. — Mary Midgley

None of us can study anything properly unless we do it with our whole being. — Mary Midgley

What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet. — Mary Midgley

The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere. — Mary Midgley

Morally as well as physically, there is only one world, and we all have to live in it — Mary Midgley

By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality. — Mary Midgley

It is extremely urgent to try and adapt our thoughts realistically to a world which has no fixed general direction either upward or downward, but is likely to vary largely according to what we do. — Mary Midgley

When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race-a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint-there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups can be found. — Mary Midgley

The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled. — Mary Midgley

Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory. — Mary Midgley

Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes. — Mary Midgley

It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview - a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before - which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific. — Mary Midgley

The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough.
The End of Anthropocentrism? — Mary Midgley