Bernard Williams

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

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.

I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say, when I was at school, I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind.

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

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

If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.

Life is supposed to be a series of peaks and valleys. The secret is to keep the valleys from becoming Grand Canyons.

What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.

We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.

Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.