M Onfray Quotes & Sayings

God will endure for as long as the reasons that brought him into being;
And so will those who deny him. — Michel Onfray

I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists. — Michel Onfray

Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks. — Michel Onfray

I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation. — Michel Onfray

Your enemy is your own self in a different uniform. — Deepak Chopra

It was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.
'Innovation', said Greenspan in April 2005, 'has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants'.
It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants. — Gilad Atzmon

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. — John Henry Newman

It is uplifting to lose one?s faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper. — Karl Kraus

I have a big problem with Islam. — Michel Onfray

Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy. — Michel Onfray

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals. — Michel Onfray

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage. — Michel Onfray

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors. — Paulo Freire

What can a philosopher show for himself? His life. If someone writes a book, but it is not accompanied by a philosophical life, it is not worth our time. Wisdom is measured in details: it is found in what one says and doesn't say, what one does and doesn't do, what one thinks and doesn't think. — Michel Onfray

Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical system where all the subjects can be taught. — Michel Onfray

It's hard for me to imagine a philosopher disconnected from the world, indifferent to the cares of his country, unmoved by poverty, unemployment: I am a committed citizen. — Michel Onfray

I do not despise believers. I find them neither ridiculous nor pathetic, but I lose all hope when I see that they prefer the comforting fairy tales of children to the cruel hard facts of adults. Better the faith that brings peace of mind than the rationality that brings worry--even at the price of perpetual mental infantilism. What a demonstration of metaphysical sleight of hand--and what a monstrous price! — Michel Onfray

You'll never learn how to do your endings until you FINISH your endings. — Brandon Sanderson

Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety. — George Bernard Shaw

For the first time (but how long will it take us to acknowledge this?) in the history of ideas, a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting, sharing his reading and his reflections, and seeking confirmation from his own observations of the everyday world. His title sets it out clearly: Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier; and so does his subtitle: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World. The book appeared in 1729, after his death. Meslier had spent the greater part of his life working on it. The history of true atheism had begun. — Michel Onfray

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve. — Michel Onfray

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition. — Michel Onfray

I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin. — Michel Onfray

We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people. — Michel Onfray

Everything is divisible. And so is this colossus of U.S. imperialism. It can be split up and defeated. — Lin Biao

It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to. — Agatha Christie

She couldn't let the tears go, but she felt them. She carried them with her everywhere she went. She imagined holding them there for the rest of her life. An ocean of tears, existing inside her. — Veronica Rossi

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted. — Michel Onfray

Like chaos in a glass cage. — Melissa Marr

A critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as Band-Aid solutions. But that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost. — Malcolm Gladwell

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil. — Michel Onfray

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better. — Michel Onfray

Religion is an irrational construct. — Michel Onfray

Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror. — Michel Onfray

The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it. — David Chipperfield

As to hanging, it is no great hardship. For were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the sea, that men of courage must starve. — Anne Bonny

By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib. — Michel Onfray

She bent and put her arms around me. "Sarah darling, you've fought harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can."O — Sue Monk Kidd

God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition. — Michel Onfray

Religion is a reassurance - in fact, that's its only purpose. — Michel Onfray

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas. — Michel Onfray

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here. — Michel Onfray

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves. — Michel Onfray