These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

We all have to face our faults and mistakes, and then choose to overcome them or let them drag us down.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

In many ways, being pregnant and working were more difficult than motherhood.

When we are able to receive life's challenges as koans rather than problems, they become interesting and exciting, rather than ponderous and depressing.

You stars that reigned at my nativity, whose influence hath allotted death and hell.

Had we kept the oil, you wouldn't have ISIS, because they fuel their growth with the oil.

Women are capable of enduring a tremendous amount of disappointment and still have a good life.

I'm not in a competition with any other artist, anything that's goin' on - I'm strictly competing with myself.