“Philosophy is the critically reflective, systematically articulated attempt to illumine our human experience in depth and set it in a vision of the whole.”

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

“We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds,... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.”

“The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.”

“The best teacher is not life, but the crystallized and distilled experience of the most sensitive, reflective, and most observant of our human beings, and this experience you will find preserved in our great books and nowhere else.”

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”