Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.

It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.

For try as one may to expel nature with a hayfork, it will always come back.

The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism.

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

No bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man: as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.

By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.

Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.

Nothing ought to be said or done which could create the impression that unbiased reconsideration of the most elementary premises of philosophy is a merely academic or historical affair.

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.

If God is One, and if there can be no other God, there can be no idea of God.

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

It is true that the successful quest for wisdom might lead to the result that wisdom is not the one thing needful. But this result would owe its relevance to the fact that it is the result of the quest for wisdom: the very disavowal of reason must be reasonable disavowal.

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.