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" 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
Weather
You
Advice
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" Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing. "
Julian Baggini
Happiness
Satisfaction
Same
" 'That which does not kill me makes me stronger' is not a law of the universe. What it can be, if we so choose, is a resolution. "
Julian Baggini
Universe
Choose
Law
" 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
People
Happy
Heroes
" From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island. "
Julian Baggini
Time
Only
Worth
" You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe. "
Julian Baggini
Believe
Choose
Moment
" 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
True
Will
Happiness
" Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions. "
Julian Baggini
Questions
Values
Good
" Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator. "
Julian Baggini
You
Opportunity
Prayer
" If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil. "
Julian Baggini
Living
Soil
Art
" 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
People
Job
Daily Life
" We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome. "
Julian Baggini
Job
Suffering
Best
" It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered. "
Julian Baggini
Leftovers
Who
Either
" I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. "
Julian Baggini
Us
Live
Home
" Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too. "
Julian Baggini
Need
Skin
View
" People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment. "
Julian Baggini
Intellectual
People
Own
" Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process. "
Julian Baggini
Cooking
Process
End
" Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. "
Julian Baggini
Root
Product
Love Is
" It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics. "
Julian Baggini
Ethics
Say
Ring
" Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality. "
Julian Baggini
Without
Morality
Seems
" Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings. "
Julian Baggini
Looking
Belonging
Blood
" Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway. "
Julian Baggini
Challenge
Progress
Important
" It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient. "
Julian Baggini
Good
True
Morality
" Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality. "
Julian Baggini
Friends
Family
Meal
" The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why, when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up. "
Julian Baggini
Reason
Work
Why
" Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. "
Julian Baggini
Philosophy
Everything
Up
" I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that. "
Julian Baggini
Believe
More
God
" The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place. "
Julian Baggini
Questioning
You
Doubt
" If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately. "
Julian Baggini
Done
Philosophy
Life
" If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities. "
Julian Baggini
Nice
World
Care
" Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt. "
Julian Baggini
Best
Hands
Thought