Alexander Nehamas famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Book #Philosophical #Thinking
So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer [â€¦] That forward-looking element is â€¦ inseparable from the judgment of beauty.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Beautiful #Long #Elements
To emphasize the importance of beauty is to connect art again to emotion and desire. To find something or someone beautiful is not simply to appreciate what you now see or know about them. It also involves the desire to get to know them better, in the hope that what you will discover will, in some way that you can't know at the time, make your life better, just as your relationship with it so far has also made it better.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Beautiful #Art #Appreciate
In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship or beauty depend on and encourage our differences. Ultimately, friendship is essential to our fashioning ourselves in ways that don't simply repeat the fashions of our surroundings: it is a mechanism of individuality.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Fashion #Individuality #Morality
It is clear that friendship is by and large crucial to human life. And I believe, in contrast with most of the philosophical tradition deriving from Aristotle, that it is not limited to a very few perfect individuals.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Believe #Philosophical #Perfect
My own view is that friendship is essential to our becoming who we are. It provides a context within which we can, more or less safely, try different ways of being, different approaches to life, and our friends, to whom we open ourselves and by whom we are willing to be influenced and directed, play a central role in what becomes of us.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Being Different #Trying #Different
To find something beautiful is to hope that your life will be better if that is a part of it. Unfortunately, the promise of a better life that beauty makes and the hope that it will be fulfilled are not always realized: beauty, like friendship, is also double-edged.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Beautiful #Promise #Better Life
My view is that friendship permeates human life and is involved in almost everything we think, feel, and do. For that very reason, there is no behavior that is characteristic of friendship. Two people can engage in the very same behavior - visiting someone in hospital, for example - and yet only one of them might be doing so out of friendship; moreover, friends can be doing absolutely anything together, even quarrel or fight. That means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize a friendship simply on the basis of what people do.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Mean #Fighting #Thinking
Beauty can be as dangerous as evil can be beautiful. But that is just another aspect of the double edge of non-moral values. Both beauty and friends can be dangerous. If you want to avoid them on these grounds, be my guest. But I wonder what your life will then be like.
-- Alexander Nehamas

#Beautiful #Evil #Wonder

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.
A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.
One has to ascertain the right path for his activities by following in the footsteps of great saintly persons and books of knowledge under the guidance of a spiritual master.
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.
Dancers are the athletes of God.
The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.
A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
Think it over, think it under.
I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed.

Alexander Nehamas famous quotes

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