«Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.»

«The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.»

«Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.»

«We search the world for truth; We cull the good, the pure, the beautiful, From all old flower fields of the soul; And weary seekers of the best, We come back laden from our quest, To find that all the sages said, Is in the Book our mothers read»