Mary Midgley Short Quotes

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

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
Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.

Mary Midgley
Arguments can always be answered. Moral philosophy, unlike straight moralizing, arises from and trives on plurality of values.

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

Mary Midgley
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
Man is innately programmed in such a way that he needs a culture to complete him. Culture is not an alternative or replacement for instinct, but its outgrowth and supplement.

Mary Midgley
Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the turkey carpet, why life was so confusing.

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
We are not just rather like animals; we are animals. Our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves.

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
As for life, I suspect that, twenty years hence, biologists may be concerning themselves with 'the question of life' just as vigorously as the rest of us now are with problems about consciousness.

Mary Midgley