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.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.
Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
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.
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
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.
The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It’s the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man’s well-being they were providing rights for themselves.
The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.