I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name.

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity -- or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity -- by being opinionated rather than by being learned.

A. N. Wilson

Man is a useless passion.

JeanPaul Sartre

It does not really avail us much to get clear definitions. I am for clarity, by all means, but to think that you can reduce a concept to a relatively simple definition, and that you can somehow go somewhere that will be interesting and fruitful, just does not seem to me to be very plausible at the present time. And that is exactly what I used to strive for. I took old Socrates seriously; you search for the definition. You get the essence of the thing, and once you get the essence and the definition that somehow captures that essence, you are home free. That is how you do philosophy. When you read Hegel, you realize how incredibly flexible and supple concepts are, how they take you for a fool when you take them too literally and too tightly, how they are interconnected with one another, how they interplay in ways you really do not understand, how in other words, strangely enough, you really do not understand any part unless, or until, you understand the whole. That is what I learned from these folks. I really think that stress on context is terribly important and enriches one's philosophical approach significantly.http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/philosophy/faculty/lachs_interview.html

John Lachs, Interview with Pat S

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Samuel Johnson

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.

Horace Smith

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Plato

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Bruce Springsteen

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

Mark Twain, 1862

In our romantic groves I adored her like a divinity.

Anne Boyd

Irreligion. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

Ambrose Bierce

We are made from Mother Earth and we go back to Mother Earth.

American Indian Proverb, Shenand