A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have. . . an ambition of transcendence.
As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.
Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.
If you look at a record under a microscope, the high frequencies are short jagged edges. . . and the low frequencies are long swinging ones are deep bass sounds. When it cut it at half speed, you're getting more of those on the record.
You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.
I have not been short of invitations to other clubs and have been received more warmly by Everton than I have by Liverpool.
Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.