If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you're right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.

Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.

Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.

The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.

The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.

Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.

Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.

I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.

Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.

Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.

I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.

There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!

Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.

From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.

It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.

People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.

Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.

It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.