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

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.

God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.

The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.

The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

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.

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