The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.