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?
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
It is easy today to deny God’s creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man’s creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God’s, exercises a strange attraction.
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
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.
An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
Culture as art is the peak expression of man’s creativity, his capacity to break out of nature’s narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.
This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions – not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy – but forming and informing them as art...
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.
It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Most of all I admire Mozart’s capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
Every age is blind to its own worst madness.
A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.
Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.
Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.
Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.