Ultimate Questions Quotes

“unshakeable convictions are not knowledge.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“I do find, however, that my fear of death decreases as the amount and quality of the life I would lose by it decreases. When I was younger, life was a feast, and I treated it as if I were a gourmet making his way from one banquet to another. In those circumstances the prospect of having this superabundance torn away induced panic. But now, in my eighties, life is no longer a cornucopia but something altogether more modest. The prospect of its being taken away is nothing like as distressing. When I was young, death meant the loss of a whole future, not only of my hopes, dreams and ambitions but also the actual life in all its abundance that I did in fact live in the decades ahead of me. Now there are no such decades. I have consumed them. For better and worse I have lived my life. By good fortune it has been a long one, containing a decent share of chances and opportunities, so I have little to complain about. Whether I made the best of it was up to me. If I did not, it was my fault. In the very living of that life the alternative confronting me has changed from that between death and an overflowingly full life to that between death and advanced old age. There is nothing like the same contrast. I am not claiming that I contemplate death with equanimity now—I do not. But there is no longer the sharp edge to my fear of it that there once was. This may seem paradoxical, given that I am so much nearer to it. But so it is.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“Both religious and non-religious persons need to understand that a conception of reality as existing beyond the limits of apprehensibility is entirely rational.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“From facts such as that life and consciousness are incomprehensible, and that values in art and morals are rooted outside the empirical world, it does not follow that I and my readers have immortal souls, or that there is a God who created the world. These things are not connected logically. When religious people are forced to admit this they say: “God moves in a mysterious way.” What kind of explanation is that? As Wittgenstein said, if the existence of the world we know is so miraculous that we feel a need to posit the existence of God to explain it, then the existence of God is even more miraculous, and how do we explain that? If one presses religious people for real explanations, explanations that really do explain, they retreat into protestations of how mysterious everything is, how far beyond human understanding. But we know that already. That is where we ourselves are coming from. What they are doing is using the ignorance we all share as a reason, so-called, for making unconnected assertions for which they can provide no foundations. And the worst of it is that these so-called explanations would not explain even if they were true, but would leave us shrouded in an even bigger mystery than before.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“When religious people say to me, as they do: “Why won’t you accept our calling the noumenal ‘God’?” my reply is: “Because you have no grounds for doing so. To do that implies a characterisation of it, and insinuates an attitude towards it. You have no justification for the implying, or the insinuating, or the characterisation. You are allowing yourself to think you are in a position you are not in—and then proceeding from there.” Religious discourse has this general characteristic. It is a form of unjustified evasion, a failure to face up to the reality of ignorance as our natural and inevitable starting-point. Anyone who sets off in honest and serious pursuit of truth needs to know that in doing that he is leaving religion behind. Unless he is prepared to do that, and to acknowledge to himself that he has, he will not even have set out on the journey—nor can he, because the position he is in is not an honest and genuine starting-point. Like a false premise in an argument, it will undermine the legitimacy of everything that follows.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“So although it is an extraordinary and consequential truth that we know ourselves from inside, it is an even more consequential truth that what we know is largely not material. I am not directly aware of my brain as a material object, nor of my skeleton, heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, intestines, and all the other material things that go to make up me. Not even by an act of will can I make myself aware of most of them. Far from knowing them well, I do not know some of them at all, and have little idea how they function. I scarcely know where some of them are, still less what they look like. I am fairly sure I would be startled by the appearance of many of them, and would find the sight of them alarming, if not disgusting. A lot of people—children obviously, but many adults too—have little idea of the organs that go to make them up. In fact, the truth is that this is not what human beings think of themselves as being. I have been living in or with my body for more than eight decades now, but it has never occurred to me to think of myself as it. I own it and am in it, as a driver owns and is in a car; and in the same way what happens to it can kill me or injure me. It exerts all sorts of influences on my life, from the important to the trivial. But I am not it. At least, I have never supposed or imagined that I am.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions

“There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.”
― Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions