The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to life

by A.C. Grayling

He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

religion has for the greatest part been, and still remains, an affliction in human affairs,

Every age thinks it is in crisis. Things have got worse, people say, clucking their tongues; crime is up, the quality of life down, the world in a mess.

For there is nothing remotely wrong with children being born to unmarried parents; but there is everything wrong with children being brought up in poverty.

Poverty, ignorance, ill-health, disadvantage and crime are not merely evils in themselves, they waste the community’s resources. Combating them takes imagination and determination, but it also takes capital investment.

the human community benefits by permitting a variety of lifestyles to flourish, because they represent experiments from which much might be learned about how to deal with the human condition.

no one has the right to tell another how to be or to act, provided that such being and acting does no harm to others.

Tolerance has to protect itself. It can easily do so by saying that anyone can put a point of view, but no one can force another to accept it. The only coercion should be that of argument, the only obligation should be to honest reasoning.

‘the highest result of education is tolerance’,

Fear begets intolerance, and intolerance begets fear: the cycle is a vicious one.

In addition to paralysing effective action, fear is the source of many social ills. It gives rise to superstitions and religions, to feelings of racial and tribal antipathies, to hostility to the new or different, to rigidity and conservatism, to adherence to outworn practices and beliefs whose only recommendation is their familiarity.

The useful timidity that protects animals living insecurely in a hostile environment where predators roam, has thus become in modern mankind a liability.

It is what we aspire to be that colours our characters – and it is our trying, not just our succeeding, which ennobles them.

Defeat is always an opportunity, even when, as far too often happens, what is genuinely the better cause has been crushed by the worse.

‘there is the greatest practical benefit in having a few failures’

the only true defeat lies in letting defeat win.

out of the heart of darkness comes the light.’

imagine them mourning when you die; and ask yourself how much sorrow you would wish them to bear.

you would wish them to continue life hopefully, which is the natural sentiment of the human condition.

We are each of us a compound of memories and hopes, and the present is where past and future meet in striving or exhaustion, triumph or despair: each of these states and many others are defined by the relationship of our past to our expectations.

‘The meditation of the wise man is a meditation not on death, but on life.’

We do not get over losses; we merely learn to live with them.

We forget that, for the vast majority of people, now as throughout history, existence is a grim labour.

Hopes for an afterlife are, in fact, a sad reflection on, and a condemnation of, the facts of this life.

‘Hope is the worst of evils,’ Nietzsche famously said, ‘for it prolongs the torment of man.’

you learn about his hopes than when you count his achievements, for the best of what we are lies in what we hope to be.

‘Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.’

Per ardua ad astra.

As Ruskin said, it is not what we get but what we become by our endeavours that makes them worthwhile.

‘The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong,’ Mark Twain said.

Loyalty is a virtue, but only when it is principled.

Modern sensibility took these comradely marriages and added them to romantic infatuation as its proper sequel,

the dead hand of oppressive institutions – principally religions –

There is no science of love because it is too various and protean to fit a theory. People attempt love as climbers attempt Everest; they scramble along, and end by camping in the foothills, or half-way up, wherever their compromises leave them. Some get high enough to see the view, which we know is magnificent, for we have all glimpsed it in dreams.

It has wisely been said that the search for happiness is one of the main sources of unhappiness in the world.

This was a useful belief for ruling elites to inculcate in their serfs and servants,

But note that some people – wicked or insane ones – can be happy pursuing bad or mad ends, so the fact that happiness arises from the pursuit of goals is no guarantee that the goals are good ones.

In this older sense ‘happy’ means prosperous and flourishing – not in money terms, although that is not excluded, but in being fortunate in possessing such amenities of life as health, friendship and opportunities to enjoy the beauty of the world.

Hitler said, ‘The effectiveness of the truly national leader consists in preventing his people from dividing their attention, and keeping it fixed on a common enemy.’

Goethe had long since remarked that nationalistic feelings ‘are at their strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture’.

Racism is on its deathbed – the question is, how costly will racists make the funeral? MARTIN LUTHER KING

Even Hitler knew it, despite making the concept central: ‘I know perfectly well … that in a scientific sense there is no such thing as race,’ he said, ‘but I as a politician need a concept which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new and antihistoric order enforced and given an intellectual basis … And for this purpose the concept of races serves me well … With the concept of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world.’

‘There is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared to us – I mean their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.’

‘if you hate a person,’ Herman Hesse remarked, ‘you hate something in him that is part of yourself.’

‘It is sweet,’ said Euripides, ‘to see your foe perish, and pay to justice everything he owes,’

to live by the rules for the sake of all-round mutual benefit.

It would be a sad individual who never overstepped a limit to see what the world looks like from the other side.

All instruments of excess are distractions; the most they teach us, when they teach us anything, is the value of their absence.

‘What a sober man has in his heart,’ says the Danish proverb, ‘the drunk has on his lips.’

Jacques Maritain says, ‘What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.’ That makes SAD a genetic yearning for