I was a structuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.

Everything solid for a time, and then the sun comes up one morning and the world begins to melt.

George Washington chopped down the tree, and then he threw away the money. Do you understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money doesn't grow on trees. This is what made our...

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and...

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

I've long tended to regard the interruption of complacency as a kind of public service.

It was autumn, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a...

Death was not just a permanent probability, as I had always felt, but an immediate reality.

You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird {the last you would have thought...

The idea of fairyland fascinates me because it's one of those things, like mermaids and dragons, that doesn't really exist, but everyone knows about it anyway. Fairyland lies only in the eye of the...

There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

One does not have to be a priest to be a man!

If you wish to carry this paper from France and deliver it into Lord Culter's hands,' he said, 'I know of no power which would stop you, unless an earthly one.' 'And that,' said Daniel Hislop, 'is the...

The illness of a doctor is always worse than the illnesses of his patients.The patients only feel, but the doctor, as well as feeling, has a pretty good idea of the destructive effect of the disease...

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a...

The light of the torches resembles the wisdom of the cowards; She illuminates badly, because she trembles.

People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their footsteps.

Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.

...{W}hat is remarkable about the Greeks--even pre-philosophically--is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an...

As Plato: 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...

Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the Shadow.

The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and...

A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the...

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare – or, if not, some equally brainy bird – who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced...

The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as...

Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was...