Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.