John Gray > Quotes

“Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“humankind's presence on Earth is nothing but a cancer”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.”
― John Gray

“النية الحسنة لاتكفي....

إن الوقوع في الحب شيء سحري دائماً....تشعر كأنه أبدي وكأنه سيدوم لأبد...إننا نعتقد بسذاجة أننا مستثنون من المشكلات التي واجهها آبائنا وأمهاتنا

ولايوجد لدينا احتما بأن الحب قد يموت ومطمئنون إلى أنه وجد ليبقى وأنه مقدر لنا أن نعيش سعداء إلى الأبد ...!!! ولكن السحر يتقهقر وتكون الغلبة للحياة اليومية..!!!

ويظهر للعيان أن الرجال يتوقعون من النساء أن يفكرن وأن تكون ردود أفعالهن مثل الرجال والنساء يتوقعن أن يشعر الرجال ويتصرفنون مثل النساء ودون وعي صريح باختلافاتنا فنحن لا نأخذ الوقت الكافي لنفهم ونحترم بعضنا البعض...ونصبح كثيري المطالب قاسين ومستائين ونصدر الأحكام وغير قادرين على التحمل.

ومع أفضل وأعظم نوايا الحب يظل الحب يموت...بطريقة ما تتسلل المشكلات...يتراكم الاستياء...تتعطل الاتصالات...وتزداد عدم الثقة...وينتج الجفاء والكبت ويضيع سحر الحب”
― John Gray, آدم من المريخ حواء من الزهرة

“Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies.

If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.”
― John N Gray

“Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.”
― John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams.”
― John Nicholas Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom

“If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals.

A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Humanism is not science, but religion - the post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived. In pre-Christian Europe is was taken for granted that the future would be like the past. Knowledge and invention might advance, but ethics would remain much the same. History was a series of cycles, with no overall meaning.
Against this pagan view, Christians understood history as a story of sin and redemption. Humanism is the transformation of this Christian doctrine of salvation into a project of universal human emancipation. The idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence. That is why among the ancient pagans it was unknown.”
― John Gray

“Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

“In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

“All these philosophies(Stoicism,Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism)have a common failing.
They imagine life can be ordered by human reason.
Either the Mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss ,or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact ,neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way.
Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body.Much of human life -and much of philosophy - is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

“Genocide is as human as art or prayer.”
― John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“In comparison with the Genesis myth, the modern myth in which humanity is marching to a better future is mere superstition. As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our madness. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know . . . The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our nature.”
― John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

“Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

“The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.”
― John N. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.
Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind. Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray. They know the meaning they have fashioned in their lives is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown in meaning, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves.”
― John N. Gray, Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life