Bernard Williams Quotes
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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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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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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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Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair.
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There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.
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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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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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'Humanity' is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.
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Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
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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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We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.
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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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I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
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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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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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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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If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.
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The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.
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If there's one theme in all my work, it's about authenticity and self-expression. It's the idea that some things are, in some real sense, really you - or express what you and others aren't.