I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.