Quotes by Michel Onfray

About Michel Onfray:

Michel Onfray is a contemporary French writer and philosopher who promotes hedonism, atheism, and anarchism. He is a highly prolific author on philosophy, having written more than 50 books.
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Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical s...

Michel Onfray

I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.

Michel Onfray

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the...

Michel Onfray

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, ...

Michel Onfray

Sorti de la bibliothèque, il serre sous son bras les trésors empruntés. La lumière des réverbères permet de commencer la lecture dans la rue. La psyché du futur philosophe se nourrit de ce monde inédit, méconnu, inconnu. Camus découvre le f...

Michel Onfray

[Über das Paradies:] Die fünf Bücher Mose, die Genesis und der Koran beschäftigen sich eingehend mit dieser hysterischen Geographie. Die muslimische Variante ist jedoch am gelungensten und lohnt wirklich die Lektüre: Bäche, Gärten, Flüsse, Qu...

Michel Onfray

I believe in libertarian options because they allow an interesting management of the capital and are based on co-operation, reciprocity, contract, federation.

Michel Onfray

It's hard for me to imagine a philosopher disconnected from the world, indifferent to the cares of his country, unmoved by poverty, unemployment: I am a committed citizen.

Michel Onfray

Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I be...

Michel Onfray

I have a big problem with Islam.

Michel Onfray

I discovered philosophy in my youth when I read 'wildly,' and thus I was exposed to the world of ideas.

Michel Onfray

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.

Michel Onfray

Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.

Michel Onfray

You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.

Michel Onfray

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

Michel Onfray

For the first time (but how long will it take us to acknowledge this?) in the history of ideas, a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting, sharing his reading and his re...

Michel Onfray

God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.

Michel Onfray

I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood -...

Michel Onfray

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

Michel Onfray

We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people.

Michel Onfray

Author Bio

  • NameMichel Onfray
  • DescriptionFrench philosopher
  • BornJanuary 1, 1959
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer; Historian; Essayist
  • AwardsPrix Médicis