To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution..

The point is, you can't keep doing the same thing and expect it to keep working..

I'm not exactly repulsive..

‎I am something that was. and I am something that not yet..

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism..

We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and their various modes of action that it would be unworthy of the philosopher to deny phenomena ….

The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read..

I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach….

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbac….

One of the things I want to do in the book is to explore how philosophy can be done in literature. I start doing that in the first chapter, by introd….

Anything that is stifled will eventually ferment or explode..

Those who are dead are not dead They're just living in my head..

Nobody can hear you read music..

I'm religiously celibate except in LA, NOLA, FLA, because there is certainly no God in any of those places. So unless you live in one of those places….

You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more..

Everything I do, I do for love..

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market ec….

Michael Jackson is everywhere. I can't not listen to what we did because it's everywhere. I listen to it all the time whether I want to or not..

You can't find what you don't go looking for..

What's it going to be then, eh?.

Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night..