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?

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

I am not a conservative — neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook... I just do not happen to be that animal.

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.

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.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.