Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all. Bernard Williams Read Quote
We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody’s weakness. Bernard Williams Read Quote
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. Bernard Williams Read Quote
The truth is that we all have to do more things than we can rightly do, if we are to do anything at all. Bernard Williams Read Quote
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. Bernard Williams Read Quote
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. Bernard Williams Read Quote
The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That’s part of their trouble. Bernard Williams Read Quote
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. Bernard Williams Read Quote
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. Bernard Williams Read Quote
