In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.

What makes Geoffrey Chaucer such compelling reading is his creation of a riveting conversation between the ideal and the everyday.

It has never been easier to get books but never harder to find the quiet needed to study them.

Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.

God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

Growing up loving the Bible made me apt to love other books. I don't love them in the same way I love the Bible, but a lesser love came easily. The splendor of sunlight does not take away

For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.

By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.

Chaucer, like Homer, writes about a journey, but as a Christian he has a different goal. Homer wanted to go home, but Chaucer's pilgrims want a place of man's true home: paradise

Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.

I'm convinced my heart knew who it belonged to, long before I met her.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

Honesty makes me feel powerful in a difficult world.

I think Barack Obama's foreign policy will be regarded more failure than success.

When people ask what were the qualities of Bobby Kennedy that they most admired, it was first that he was tough. Second, he told the truth and third, he stood up for the little guy.

This is your moment. You're meant to be here.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.