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

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

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.

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.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

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