7+ Alexander Nehamas Quotes And Sayings

Following is our list of the best Alexander Nehamas quotes and sayings.

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

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. — Alexander Nehamas

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

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

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

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

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