Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.

A child's natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be.

We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people.

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.