Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.

The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition

What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister - corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.