Mary Midgley Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough.
The End of Anthropocentrism?

Mary Midgley

#3. 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

#4. Morally as well as physically, there is only one world, and we all have to live in it

Mary Midgley

#5. By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.

Mary Midgley

#6. Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

Mary Midgley

#7. 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

#8. The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere.

Mary Midgley

#9. Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.

Mary Midgley

#10. Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.

Mary Midgley

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

Mary Midgley