There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

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

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

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.