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

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

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.

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

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

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.