Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.

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.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

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.

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.