Top 40 A.C. Grayling Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Per ardua ad astra.”

— A.C. Grayling

2. “A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.”

— A.C. Grayling

3. “Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.”

— A.C. Grayling

4. “There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.”

— A.C. Grayling

5. “I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton’s head.”

— A.C. Grayling

6. “And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.”

— A.C. Grayling

7. “Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.”

— A.C. Grayling

8. “I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.”

— A.C. Grayling

9. “Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.”

— A.C. Grayling

10. “To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”

— A.C. Grayling

11. “I believe that decisions about the timing and manner of death belong to the individual as a human right. I believe it is wrong to withhold medical methods of terminating life painlessly and swiftly when an individual has a rational and clear-minded sustained wish to end his or her life.”

— A.C. Grayling

12. “Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.”

— A.C. Grayling

13. “Dripping water wears the stone which could not be hammered.”

— A.C. Grayling

14. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.”

— A.C. Grayling

15. “Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.”

— A.C. Grayling

16. “Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult. ERICH FROMM.”

— A.C. Grayling

17. “For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.”

— A.C. Grayling

18. “The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.”

— A.C. Grayling

19. “Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women’s institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.”

— A.C. Grayling

20. “Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.”

— A.C. Grayling

21. “Inculcating the various competing – competing, note – falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.”

— A.C. Grayling

22. “It takes a certain ingenuous faith – but I have it – to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.”

— A.C. Grayling

23. “Goethe had long since remarked that nationalistic feelings ‘are at their strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture’.”

— A.C. Grayling

24. “Govern a family as you would cook a small fish. CHINESE PROVERB.”

— A.C. Grayling

25. “To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage itself.”

— A.C. Grayling

26. “The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions. ALEXANDER CHASE.”

— A.C. Grayling

27. “One day everything will be well, that is our hope,’ said Voltaire; ’today everything is fine, that is our illusion.”

— A.C. Grayling

28. “A fault denied is twice committed.”

— A.C. Grayling

29. “Religion and science have a common ancestor – ignorance.”

— A.C. Grayling

30. “Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.”

— A.C. Grayling

31. “When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?”

— A.C. Grayling

32. “If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.”

— A.C. Grayling

33. “Look at the blogosphere – the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.”

— A.C. Grayling

34. “Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.”

— A.C. Grayling

35. “It doesn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being – Everything is full of wonder.”

— A.C. Grayling

36. “Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.”

— A.C. Grayling

37. “The rich cannot eat money,’ dryly observes a Russian proverb, ’so it’s just as well that there are poor folk to grow their food.”

— A.C. Grayling

38. “The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be.”

— A.C. Grayling

39. “Whereas the consolations of religion are mainly personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal.”

— A.C. Grayling

40. “It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.”

— A.C. Grayling

41. “Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded That all the Apostles would have done as they did. LORD BYRON.”

— A.C. Grayling

42. “Fear If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl. SA’DI.”

— A.C. Grayling

43. “The rich man may never get into heaven,’ remarked Alexander Chase, ’but the poor are already serving their term in hell.”

— A.C. Grayling

44. “Hope is a virtue independently of its realisations; it is an intrinsic value, an end in itself, allied to courage and imagination, a positive attitude full of possibility and aspiration. For that reason you discover more about a person when you learn about his hopes than when you count his achievements, for the best of what we are lies in what we hope to be.”

— A.C. Grayling

45. “Without doubt, prudence is a virtue. As the Ashanti say, ‘No one tests the depth of a river with both feet.”

— A.C. Grayling

46. “Faith is what I die for, dogma is what I kill for,’ as the saying has it; and the trouble is that all faith is based on dogma.”

— A.C. Grayling

47. “Prudence He does well who moors his boat with two anchors. PUBLILIUS SYRUS.”

— A.C. Grayling

48. “Hatred is a sentiment that leads to the extinction of values. ORTEGA Y GASSET.”

— A.C. Grayling

49. “One frankness invites a reciprocal frankness, and draws forth discoveries, like wine and love,’ wrote Montaigne.”

— A.C. Grayling