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.

— Allan Bloom

Allan Bloom Quotes

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

— Allan Bloom

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

— Allan Bloom

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

— Allan Bloom

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...

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

— Allan Bloom

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

— Allan Bloom

Most of all I admire Mozart’s capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

— Allan Bloom

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom

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.

— Allan Bloom
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