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

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.

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.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

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

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.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.