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.

The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved's recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love.

Does God have a reason for wanting us to be charitable, to take care of those who can't take care of themselves? Either God does or God doesn't, it's just logic. If God has a reason then there is a reason independent of God and whatever God's reason is we should figure it out for ourselves. There is a reason and God doesn't really ground morality at all. God wants us to give charity because it's the right thing to do.

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

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

I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.