Bernard Williams Quotes
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People who express themselves in paradoxes are in a strong position; and the more outrageous the paradox, in general the stronger the position.
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Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.
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Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.
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Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.
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Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
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Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.
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A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.
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Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.
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There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.
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The truth is that we all have to do more things than we can rightly do, if we are to do anything at all.
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Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.
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There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
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We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.
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People who say, 'Let the chips fall where they may,' usually figure they will not be hit by a chip.
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Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
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As Roland Barthes said, those who do not re-read condemn themselves to reading the same story everywhere: 'they recognize what they already think and know.'
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'Humanity' is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.
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I was attracted to opera when I was 15 or 16. A very rich man in England bankrupted himself to put on a lot of opera during the war, but he converted a lot of people, myself included, in the process.
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If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.
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I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
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If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.
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The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.
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Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.
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The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.