“The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.”
“As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.”
“The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.”
“There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.”
“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.”
“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.”
“The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
“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.”
“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.”