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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

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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
Mean
Choice
Brings
Great
Risk
Fully
Every
Serious
Bear
Thinking
Full
Consequence
Seriousness
Life
Choices
Aware
Intensity
Means
Questions
Alternatives
Death
Bears
Consequences
Hard
Necessary
Recognition

More quotes by Allan Bloom

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Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Allan Bloom
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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
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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
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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
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Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The self is the modern substitute for the soul.
Allan Bloom
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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.
Allan Bloom
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Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.
Allan Bloom
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Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
Allan Bloom
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University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.
Allan Bloom
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Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.
Allan Bloom
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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
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The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.
Allan Bloom
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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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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
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There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.
Allan Bloom