Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

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.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

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.