You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. - Hannah Arendt

"Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she ad- ministered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a "parvenu," an "upstart," an "adventurer," a politician was al- ways "cheap," and an opportunist "vulgar." But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him- self the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned."

She considered [her] life, which had not been a life but only a sort of greeting, a Hello There.

Kant was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.