Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be young.

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

The sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life.

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.

I like that there are so many different ways of looking at the world and I like all of the particular narratives. In any case we will never all see the same way on these [religious] issues. It's the way liberals and conservatives will never see the same way on individuals whereas it’s different orientations and they go too deep down and when we're dealing with questions that can't be definitively answered by science that's where you're sort of... your orientation swells in to fill up the gaps and so we're never always going to agree.