Bryan Magee famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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.
-- Bryan Magee

#Life #Feelings #Everyday
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this---what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as 'mankind's need for metaphysics.'
-- Bryan Magee

#Philosophy #Real #Writing
To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.
-- Bryan Magee

#Real #Believe #Self
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.
-- Bryan Magee

#Interesting #Magic #May
It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.
-- Bryan Magee

#Mystery #Humans
The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
-- Bryan Magee

#Philosophy #Real #Writing
The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
-- Bryan Magee

#Philosophy #Thinking #Important

The things that make me different are the things that make me.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.
I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again.
There are certain truths which stand out so openly on the roadsides of life, as it were, that every passer-by may see them. Yet, because of their obviousness, the general run of people disregard such truths or at least they do not make them the object of any concious knowledge. People are so bliend to some of the simplest facts in everyday life that they are highly surprised when somebody calls attention to what everybody ought to know.
Our words can have power that we donâ€™t think we have in everyday life. Anyone can make a difference!
It gets tiring, doing the same thing everyday.
When I swore that you're getting more and more beautiful everyday. Well, I was only kidding, honey.

Bryan Magee famous quotes

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