The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives. – Julian Baggini
Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging. – Julian Baggini
Yesterday’s news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists. – Julian Baggini
This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don’t accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols, but we also want egalitarianism, and that requires proclamations of humility from our gods. – Julian Baggini
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold. – Julian Baggini
The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees. – Julian Baggini
Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality. – Julian Baggini
Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone ‘just doing my job’ or the infernal self-checkout machine. – Julian Baggini
Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like. – Julian Baggini
Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions. – Julian Baggini
Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing. – Julian Baggini
There are many things you shouldn’t measure. Don’t, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife! – Julian Baggini
In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year. – Julian Baggini
Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different. – Julian Baggini
The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. – Julian Baggini
No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can’t decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you’ve made in your life to date. – Julian Baggini
Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. – Julian Baggini