“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”

“The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. ”

“What makes us moral beings is that...there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit...But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.”

“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

“The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.”

“Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.”

“...the conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors]...to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.”