Much like tobacco companies want to keep smokers dependent on their deadly product, the oil industry wants to keep California dependent on oil – an expensive, dirty and limited resource that damages health.

If we are to redeem any part of our world from the brute march of power, we may have to begin as modern art does by exalting some of the humble and dirty little corners of existence.

For man to enter history as the rational animal, it was necessary for him to be convinced that the objects of his reasoning, the Ideas, were more real than his own individual person or the particular objects that made up his world. The great step forward into rationalism required its own mythology – such perhaps is always the ambiguity of human evolution.

We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know we are going to die. Without this passionate realization of our mortality, time would be simply a movement of the clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance – a movement devoid of human meaning.

Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.

When faith is full, it dares to express its anger, for faith is the openness of the whole man toward his God, and therefore must be able to encompass all human modes of being.

The word “intelligentsia” is of Russian origin; its coinage bears witness to the fact that intellectuals, whatever their original social or economic class, felt themselves a distinct cultural group in Russia because by their very nature they were alienated from the rest of the society.

For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences.

We exist within the question of God.

To discover one’s own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit.