Unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life.

No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.

This is the end of the day, but soon there will be a new day.

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.

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.

I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy.

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.

We grow a little every time we do not take advantage of somebody's weakness.

Women have a favorite room, men a favorite chair.

It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.

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.

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.

A half-truth is usually less than half of that.

September tries its best to have us forget summer.

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

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

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.

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.