Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
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.
Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.
True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—-as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
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.
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise… specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
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.
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.