Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.