Bryan Magee Quotations

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.

From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers.

I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.

It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.