"You are the music while the music lasts."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."

"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

"That's what liberalism is all about, is promoting incompetence on the basis it's fair, because people would be the best if they weren't discriminated against."

"Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms."

"There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love."

"There is…but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."