Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

I suppose for a very long time I've been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.