“In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.”

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Life begins when we decide it’s going to begin for us.

A strong beginning is a good thing only when coupled with a strong finish.

Every achievement, big or small, begins in your mind.

In terms of finding that first international recognition of my work, coming back to Cannes is such a milestone in my life because it began actually with ‘Devdas’.

Choosing to unconditionally love, I begin a new karmic account.

Once the races begin it’s more difficult and there is never that much time for testing.

I was trained from the beginning to work, to save. I have always regarded it a as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could.

I trust the universe. If we exist for each other, time will bring is both back to our beginning.