Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.

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.

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.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.