… in this house that Carl Jung built, piling up stones with his own hands, at the very entrance, he found the need to chisel out these words… Sometimes I close my eyes and repeat them over and over, and they make me strangely calm. ‘Cold or Not, God Is Present.’

… men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon polished into the soil for compost… they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

... the fundamental method is to carry out observation and tests.

...As with any truly great writer, it is foolish to judge Rousseau by the instances where people tried to follow his advice literally, still less by the harmful things done in his name (by which standard Jesus Christ does not exactly come off unblemished). Rousseau’s influence on modern culture has been far too vast and multifaceted to squeeze into reductive categories of 'positive' and 'negative' and even his most misguided prescriptions often came accompanied by profound and poetic insights.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

...leadership can come from anywhere. You don’t have to be a certain type of person or have a certain type of education to be a leader. You just have to be willing to throw yourself into the fight. That’s all it takes.

...men endeavor to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society… Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.

...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

…since you are fundamentally complete in every respect, you should not try to supplement that perfection by such meaningless practices… Only awake to the One Mind, and thre is nothing whatsoever to be attained.

...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

…the endlessness of all that is, and the limitation of mortal bodily life, are the same, and their sameness is the key to the door.

...the Great Books [are] the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof.

...the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of energy, capable of bathing even the etheral atoms in its ideally illuminated space.

...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.

…the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook.

...The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country. … It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency

...they didn’t think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd.