"Socratic trustworthiness depends upon devices of irony, both spoken and acted. … The irony of words prevents Socrates from being taken as the source of doctrines. The irony of actions prevents Socrates from being made into the literal founder of a philosophic school. … The ironic voice does not seek to possess the student, but directs him, lustlessly, to the desire of philosophy itself ."

“Historiography cannot, by itself, answer the question about the criterion for pedagogical authenticity. So much is obvious in the construction of the historical account, which must assume some principle of selection in order to produce a coherent narrative. That principle of selection will be a judgment either of correctness or of "importance." The former begs the question; the latter is either a concealed judgment of correctness or the reduction of philosophy to popularity. In Aristotle, the principle of selection is an otherwise established judgment of correctness. In much academic historiography, the principle often seems to be popularity. Neither provides an answer to the question about legitimate authority in philosophy.”

“Aristippus is credited with having said that those who stop short of philosophy in the preparatory studies are like Penelope's suitors: they marry the maids, but not the mistress.”

“One reason that Christian theology is so detached from larger intellectual or artistic movements is that it has not suffered consciously a crisis of its expressive forms. At a cultural moment when most humanistic disciplines—not to say, literature and all of the fine arts—have passed through several generations of radical formal innovation, theology is still written as if the conventional forms posed no problems.”

“The end of philosophic education, on many ancient views, is not a body of propositions to be measured against an equally propositional and already apprehended truth. The end is, rather, the having of abiding intellectual excellences, of a power to think truthfully.”

“The claim of philosophy to be about the whole can be secured only if the many "ordinary" languages in the whole can be taken over by an act of persuasion into a language about the whole.”

“Porphyry is right to suggest that Plotinus' teaching "voice" has about it something particular , speaking as if inspired and from his own experience rather than out of the tradition. The rhetorical character of the "voice" is precisely that of an autobiographical urgency in the attainment of the One: "Attempt to lead the god in you back to the godhead in the all.”