Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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?
Allan Bloom
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Allan Bloom
Age: 62 †
Born: 1930
Born: September 14
Died: 1992
Died: October 7
Classical Scholar
Journalist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Indianapolis
Indiana
Allan David Bloom
Student
Become
Ignorant
School
Lifetime
Every
Labor
Students
Knew
Unceasing
High
Socrates
Easy
More quotes by 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
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.
Allan Bloom
The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.
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
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
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished.
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
Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.
Allan Bloom
The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
Allan Bloom
Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
Allan Bloom
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.
Allan Bloom
The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Allan Bloom
An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.
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
The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
Allan Bloom
The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.
Allan Bloom
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Allan Bloom
The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Allan Bloom
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.
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
