Julian Baggini Quotes

What the founders of modern science ... had to do was to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

Truth is created, not discover!

I found that most people don't really want to know the truth. There are plenty of people who want to know the truth on their terms or require that the truth be contained within certain boundaries of comfort. But truth can never be known this way. You have to seek truth from a place of not knowing, and that can be a very threatening place because we think we already know the truth or we are afraid of what the truth might be.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?

It's rather clear that we've got to do something differently â€" and going into space and learning to utilize these resources, to think differently about ourselves, is vital right now.

Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

Without your downs, without your hardships, I don't think you appreciate the ups as much.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

It's not my concern. It's your concern. I just keep working. I keep posing certain questions and I think there are times when people think "What happened to the Judith Butler I used to know?" or "She's not doing gender trouble. Does that mean she refuses it or she's disavowed it?" And I would say no. I have not refused or disavowed anything.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow.

The unprecedented success of Keynesianism is due to the fact that it provides an apparent justification for the 'deficit spending' policies of contemporary governments. It is the pseudo-philosophy of those who can think of nothing else than to dissipate the capital accumulated by previous generations.

When I'm alcohol-free now and even to see the world around me, I appreciate it, but I never truly enjoy too much of it maybe because I feel like I'm a working musician. There are some joyous moments, but I will not think a joyous moment.

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.

We are under the stifling regulation and taxes of a predominantly left-wing type of thinking and philosophy. The eight years of Barack Obama have shrouded this country in punitive regulations. We haven't had economic growth higher than one and a half percent for the last eight or nine years, and that was done on purpose. There have been robust times in the past, and there are a lot of people right now that are doing well and are growing. But generally it ought to be much better in the past. There needs to be an economic revival.

I think, therefore I am confused.

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

If I could only fly, you see, a lot of my problems would be gone. When you think of just how much I'd save on shoes alone.

In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done.

It is of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.