The love of her life dissolved into dreams.
Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better. "
Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. [If] what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses.
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
To matter, to mind. . . . What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. . . . Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.
The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.
Learning a new skill can change hundreds of millions of cortical connections.
When you play the oboe, the flute or other wind instruments, there is something between you and the breath; there is the embouchure, the reed, etc. But with the recorder, I receive an immediate response from the instrument. This is something that attracted me to the instrument, that I could immediately feel the response of what I was doing.
When a woman says, 'I don't wish to mention any names', it means it ain't necessary to mention any names.