Top 40 John N. Gray Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “At its worst human life is not tragic but unmeaning. The soul is broken, but life lingers on. As the will fails, the mask of tragedy falls aside. What remains is only suffering. The last sorrow cannot be told. If the dead could speak we would not understand them. We are wise to hold to the semblance of tragedy; the truth unveiled would only blind us.”

— John N. Gray

2. “This may be the era of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process. Whatever is done now, human expansion has triggered a shift that will persist for thousands of years.”

— John N. Gray

3. “Today liberal humanism has the pervasive power that was once possessed by revealed religion. Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.”

— John N. Gray

4. “We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonising religion. It goes with being human.”

— John N. Gray

5. “What seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict – the contending impulses that divide us from ourselves. No other animal seeks the satisfaction of its desires and at the same time curses them as evil; spends its life terrified of death while being ready to die in order to preserve an image of itself;.”

— John N. Gray

6. “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

7. “Genocide is as human as art or prayer.”

— John N. Gray

8. “The source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place. For humans, the world itself is a threatening and strange place. Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable. Philosophers have often dismissed these faiths as being far beneath their own metaphysical speculations, but religion and philosophy serve the same need.1 Both try to fend off the abiding disquiet that goes with being human.”

— John N. Gray

9. “Like cheap music, the myth of progress lifts the spirits as it numbs the brain.”

— John N. Gray

10. “There was no hint of belief in Santayana’s life in the convent. ‘My atheism, like that of Spinoza,’ he wrote, ’is true piety to the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.’6 In comparing himself.”

— John N. Gray

11. “We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.”

— John N. Gray

12. “Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.”

— John N. Gray

13. “Social evolution is an exceptionally bad idea.”

— John N. Gray

14. “When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable.”

— John N. Gray

15. “1 Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true. This may be unfortunate, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. If human unreason frustrates or endangers you, walk away.”

— John N. Gray

16. “The belief that humans are gradually improving is the central article of faith of modern humanism. When wrenched from monotheistic religion, however, it is not so much false as meaningless.”

— John N. Gray

17. “The scientific revolution was, in many ways, a by-product of mysticism and magic. In fact, once the tangled origins of modern science are unravelled, it is doubtful whether a ‘scientific revolution’ occurred.”

— John N. Gray

18. “But we should recognize that, if we redesign nature to fit human wishes, we risk making it a mirror of our own pathologies. A world that has been rebuilt into a factory producing the things humans need or want will be a world without wilderness and from which many of the species with which we share the planet will disappear.”

— John N. Gray

19. “Among Christians, only Protestants have ever believed that work smacks of salvation; the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature. The pygmies of the African rainforests – now nearly extinct – work only to meet the needs of the day, and spend most of their lives idling.”

— John N. Gray

20. “The advance of reason has the effect of weakening illusions that are necessary to civilization:.”

— John N. Gray

21. “In a competition for mates, a well developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage, The same is true in politics and other contexts.”

— John N. Gray

22. “But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.”

— John N. Gray

23. “Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad.”

— John N. Gray

24. “Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. By destabilizing the climate, it is making the planet less hospitable to human life. By developing new technologies of mass communication and warfare, it has set in motion processes of evolution that may end up displacing it.”

— John N. Gray

25. “In intellectual terms the Cold War was a competition between two ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, that had a great deal in common. Though they saw one another as mortal enemies they differed chiefly on the question of which economic system was best suited to achieve goals they shared.”

— John N. Gray

26. “Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy’s greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun.”

— John N. Gray

27. “The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.”

— John N. Gray

28. “Unknown to itself, the human mind creates worlds it cannot grasp. The places that are made by humans are as numinous and fugitive as those that appear in forest shade. Breaking the spell of diurnal perception, you can see landscapes in cities as unexpected as those that explorers discover in uncharted regions of the globe. A.”

— John N. Gray

29. “Equally, why should a superhuman species fashioned by humans bother about its creators?”

— John N. Gray

30. “Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image.”

— John N. Gray

31. “Few societies have been stable enough and resilient enough to renew themselves in recognizable forms over long stretches of time. History is littered with civilizations that have been utterly destroyed. Everywhere, the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events, leaving all their prayers, records and treatises wholly forgotten unless they are retrieved from oblivion by future archaeologists and historians.”

— John N. Gray

32. “Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.”

— John N. Gray

33. “The same is true of species. Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human – self-awareness, rationality and the like. Quite the contrary: by enabling the increase in human power that has taken place over the past few centuries, these very attributes may bring about humanity’s obsolescence.”

— John N. Gray

34. “Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover. Long after the last 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 N. Gray

35. “A type of atheism that refused to revere humanity would be a genuine advance.”

— John N. Gray

36. “Contemporary culture rejects the idea of nature for the same reason it rejects the idea of God. Both set limits to the human will.”

— John N. Gray

37. “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.”

— John N. Gray

38. “Science cannot replace a religious view of the world, since there is no such thing as ‘a scientific worldview’. A method of inquiry rather than a settled body of theories, science yields different views of the world as knowledge advances. Until Charles Darwin showed that species changed over time, science pictured a world of fixed species. In the same way, classical.”

— John N. Gray

39. “At bottom, hatred of cats may be an expression of envy. Many human beings lead lives of muffled misery. Torturing other creatures is a relief, since it inflicts worse suffering on them. Tormenting cats is particularly satisfying, since they are so satisfied in themselves. Cat-hatred is very often the self-hatred of misery-sodden human beings redirected against creatures they know are not unhappy.”

— John N. Gray

40. “Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live. Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not.”

— John N. Gray

41. “According to the theory, human beings do not deal with conflicting beliefs and perceptions by testing them against facts.”

— John N. Gray

42. “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.”

— John N. Gray

43. “Whereas cats live by following their nature, humans live by suppressing theirs.”

— John N. Gray

44. “Do not become attached to your suffering, and avoid those who do.”

— John N. Gray