“I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon.”

“I do not believe that an “impulseto knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses.”

“Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. ...when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?”

“Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.”

“She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

“I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.”