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

The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

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

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

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.