Michel Onfray Quotes

God will endure for as long as the reasons that brought him into being;
And so will those who deny him.

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

We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.

I do not despise believers. I find them neither ridiculous nor pathetic, but I lose all hope when I see that they prefer the comforting fairy tales of children to the cruel hard facts of adults. Better the faith that brings peace of mind than the rationality that brings worry--even at the price of perpetual mental infantilism. What a demonstration of metaphysical sleight of hand--and what a monstrous price!

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.

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.

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child's body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.

We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people.

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.

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.

Not having children derives not from dislike, but from love too great to bring them into this world, too limited, too vain, too cruel.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.

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.

By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.