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.
If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.
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.
Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.
I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.
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.
Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in the light of the best explanations we have of how such disagreement arises.
Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.
The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.
An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity.
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
People who express themselves in paradoxes are in a strong position; and the more outrageous the paradox, in general the stronger the position.
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.
There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.
We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.
