Mary Midgley - Live Quotes

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All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.

Mary Midgley

But my present point is a much wider one. What we need, in order to feel at home in the world, is certainly not a belief that it was made for us. We are at home in this world because we were made for it. we have developed here, on this planet, and are adapted to live here. Our emotional constitution is part of that adaptation. We are not fit to live anywhere else. (The possibility, such as it is, of surviving briefly, and at ruinous expense in space-craft and the like is just parasitical; it depends on extending the conditions we are used to into a few bizarre corners, not on our being able to live in other conditions.)

Mary Midgley

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

Mary Midgley

Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.

Mary Midgley