A student of Derek Parfit’s:

“When, at the end of the seminar, I told him I was honored that he was able to remember my name, he told me that it never mattered to him whether anyone remembered his name, since names were the simplest and least significant facts about a person.”

“Over dinner, talk turned to the first world war, and Derek became upset at the thought of the loss of life that the war involved. I found this both unsettling and moving: unsettling because I don’t know anyone else who now has this reaction to deaths that occurred so long ago..”

“...and moving because it seemed to me that Derek’s unusual kind of compassion stretched beyond what I or others that I know are capable of.”

“[Parfit] worried about how fast a reader he was, because most of the people he respected the most were slow readers.”

The best Parfit quote, though, is this one.

There’s just something incredibly deep and comforting about it.