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.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

[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.

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

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