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

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

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

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 facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.