Our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even imagined what it would be like to have imagination.

Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.

There are many ways of being clever, but only one way of being wise.

It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that comes to an end.

Funny how a new piece of understanding immediately seems self-evident, even when it took half a lifetime of struggle and stagnation to acquire.