RAY'S VIEWS ONLINE

Philosopher, author, broadcaster (1930-2019)

“One of the most reliable signs that you need a holiday is the conviction that you cannot spare the time to take one.” 

“People’s assumptions about you tell you a great deal about them.” 

“We can never be sure that something is right, though we can be sure that something is wrong.”

“Failure is an important and valuable experience. Failure sharpens people’s awareness of their own fallibility, their own common humanity, and deepens their understanding of those in others.”

“The defeated live in the past.“

“Trying to understand the world through reasoning alone is like setting off across the Sahara with a limitless supply of water but nothing else.”

“There is a world of difference between being lost in the daylight and being lost in the dark.”

“Man is like a chimpanzee holding a Ming vase and looking at it in wonderment, baffled. The vase is life. And there is no possible way the chimpanzee is going to understand it.”

“Death – I can only hope that when it is my turn, my curiosity will overcome my fear, though I may then be in the position of a man whose candle goes out and plunges him into pitch blackness at the very instant when he thought he was about to find what he was looking for.”

“Ceasing to exist is metaphysical. Just as it is impossible for nothing to become something, so it is impossible for something to become nothing” …..