Michel Onfray Quotes

I'm taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I'm taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can't tell you how much it's not me.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

I've deliberately studied many things that I know, going in, I won't be able to assimilate. I read Plato, St. Thomas, the mystics, to exercise my mind.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

To live is to think.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

When I went to university, I was a philosophy major, but because I'm not very bright I chose to study philosophy at a performing arts school, maybe because the philosophy program there wasn't too rigorous or challenging.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

The examined life is no picnic.

You need philosophy. It sounds a little pompous but I think when you direct a film, the only way to find a response to the questions you keep asking yourself is to have a philosophy.

Since philosophy now criticizes everything it comes across, a critique of philosophy would be nothing less than a just reprisal.

Do I appear to you to have come to a wrong decision, if I devote that time to philosophy, which I otherwise should have spent at the loom?

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play

The major public goals in my life are intellectual goals. There are various philosophical things that I want to work on and work out.

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Every single university student should study philosophy. You need to lead the examined life and question your beliefs. If you don't learn critical thinking, then political debate degenerates into a contest of slogans.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.