Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

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

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

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.

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.