To many men... The miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.