If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.

Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

God's reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of the world - and man.

Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters the first things and the right way the only source of knowledge was hearsay.