The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody’s head all of the time.
Freud’s view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.
All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.
If your friend wishes to read your ‘Plutarch’s Lives,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘The Federalist Papers,’ tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat – but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.
The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.
Political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.
One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.
Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.
Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.
Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.
The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.
My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What’s the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.
Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
Philosophy is everybody’s business.
All genuine learning is active, not passive.
Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.
One of the aims of sexual union is procreation – the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union.
Education is the sum total of one’s experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.