It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.