Bernard Williams

An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity.

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

The majority of philosophers are totally humorless. That's part of their trouble.

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.

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.

If we try and fail, we have temporary disappointments. But if we do not try at all, we have permanent regrets.

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.

Ideas are like wandering sons. They show up when you least expect them.

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.

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.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.