My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

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.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

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

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.