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

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

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.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

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.