Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

Life is given us as a passion.

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.