The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.