All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

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

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.