My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it's filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur. - Saul Bellow

It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By
means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou
relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go
in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's
beds, too.

As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.

As a scholar [Allan Bloom] intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. … Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.