Allan Bloom Quotes

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.

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

The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die... His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

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.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

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

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

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.

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.