8 Quotes by Bryan Magee

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.

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

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.

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

Even if it could be shown that all explanations can be reduced ultimately to those of science, and even if all the reductions were then to be carried out, the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning.

Something else I learnt... is respect for reality as against all the many alternatives to it – conventional assumptions, fashionable ways of looking at things, ideologies, social or personal aspirations, fears, intentions, wishful thinking, religious claims, and the rest...