“In his work itself, especially in his examinations, he very soon acquired a method of eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every prescribed formality.”
″[University] teaches [man] to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.”
“This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave.”
“I have a future ahead of me that will likely include an Ivy League education, an eventual law degree, and a career in public policy. Sadly, during the wee hours of this morning, literally none of that mattered.”
“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”