Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every age is blind to its own worst madness.
The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
The longing for Europe has been all but extinguished in the young.
It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.
University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
The way I knew I was right about something was the kids got angry. That's very important: you touch that anger.
Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.
Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.
Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.
I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can, in turn, be a blessing to society.
Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.
We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.
The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.
Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... "relationship"? The term "relationship" ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.