39 Quotes by Michel Onfray

Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.

Religion is a reassurance - in fact, that's its only purpose.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.

Religion is an irrational construct.

I persist in preferring philosophers to rabbis priests imams ayatollahs and mullahs. Rather than trust their theological hocus-pocus I prefer to draw on alternatives to the dominant philosophical historiography: the laughers materialists radicals cynics hedonists atheists sensualists voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuinely deadly sin.

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read wildly, and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.

I have a big problem with Islam.

What can a philosopher show for himself? His life. If someone writes a book, but it is not accompanied by a philosophical life, it is not worth our time. Wisdom is measured in details: it is found in what one says and doesn’t say, what one does and doesn’t do, what one thinks and doesn’t think.