Quotes from Alexander Nehamas

I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.

But is eternity an alternative to life? Isn't it, on the contrary, the case that it is when one wants everything to be eternal that one most loves life and the world.

Like metaphors and works of art, the people who matter to us are all, so far as we are concerned, inexhaustible. They always remain a step beyond the furthest point our knowledge of them has reached—though only if, and as long as, they still matter to us.

What to me is truly frightful is not the quality of what everyone agrees on, but the very fact of universal agreement.

So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer […] That forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty.