“Knowledge can be heady stuff, but it easily leads to an excess of zeal! -- to illusions of grandeur and a desire to impress others and achieve eminence . . . Our search for knowledge should be ceaseless, which means that it is open-ended, never resting on laurels, degrees, or past achievements.”

“True knowledge never shuts the door on more knowledge, but zeal often does.”

“No matter where we begin, if we pursue knowledge diligently and honestly, our quest will inevitably lead us from the things of the earth to the things of heaven.”

“As knowledge increases, the verdict of yesterday must be reversed today, and in the long run the most positive authority is the least to be trusted.”

“All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.”

“Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading.”

“Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.”