Sublime

William Maxwell says it somewhere in The Folded Leaf: that the teenager gets so brooding in his sexuality and self-sanctity that all he requires of others is their absence.

There, among Hubert Humphrey, Vladimir Nabokov, Marianne Moore, Robert Graves, Senator George McGovern, William Safire, Isaac Asimov, Timothy Leary, Muhammad Ali, Bob Hope, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan, Justice William O. Douglas, Ed Koch, Gwendolyn Brooks,

he contends that philosophy has been overly concerned with knowledge (epistemology). This, he believes, turns all our relationships into instruments, alienating us from the world (to give him a little of Rosa’s language).

the students I meet are very much interested in mythology because myths bring them messages.

is that average levels of happiness in the United States have risen very little if at all over the past 50 years despite substantial growth in per capita incomes.13

Our social skills are currently inadequate to the pluralistic societies we are living in.

Seven years later, at the height of his public influence, he repeated the value he placed on those committed to the life of the mind. In an October 1963 speech at Amherst College, he would say, “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispens

Those who shape the manners and mores are the true legislators of mankind—they wield the greatest power and influence.

psychoanalyst Erich Fromm