Quotes from Anthony Esolen

Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.

Man is not only that creature that forges tools, that reasons, and that walks upright. Man is the creature that looks up. Man praises.

How silly were the idolaters of old, who knelt before the clumsy wooden figurines of their own making! We are wiser now. We kneel before mirrors.

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. "The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God— made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty.

In a pit of mud, everyone looks like everyone else. It is the clean who are distinct. In a mob, everyone behaves like everyone else. It is the friend who is distinct.

For in those days I had no idea that many of the greatest books are like a forest, and that the best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new...Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.

We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.

Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.

The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men "well-rounded," like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man's mysterious encounter with his Creator. To

Nearly all the school subjects lay great stress on information. But literature makes its appeal to the heart as well as the intellect. Geography

For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.

when people accuse us of being retrograde, or medieval, or puritanical—all words rummaged out of the box labeled "Not Progressive"—we should shrug, as if they had accused us of walking on two feet, and

Until the sexual revolution, most people understood that customs and laws regarding sex were customs and laws to strengthen or at least to protect the family, and that the family was not something created by the State, but was its own small kingdom, a natural society, founded in the bodily nature of man.

Where there is no faith, human choices, in all their mad variety, reel back into the dark woods, or into the inextricable error of the labyrinth. But the labyrinth is intolerable. We must be going somewhere.

So we teach them how to sit still, how to obey bells, how to make insipid clichés pass for thought, how to be "subversive" in trivial and uniform ways, how to think "outside the box" of tradition and wisdom and into the stainless steel cage of the politically "correct," how to extend the political pinky while sipping the political tea.

If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.

There's all the difference in the world between teaching a human being and sanding the gears in a machine. The machine does a job. The human being embarks on a quest. The machine hums a dreary, constant drone. The human being sings. One

Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers.

We sense that the human body is a precious thing, worthy of our reverence. It is not a tool, not an object of consumption like a steak or a keg of beer, not an animate provider of pleasure. It is the outward expression of a profound mystery, that of another human being.

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.

Words fail us. They are like keys: they open, but they also shut. When we were small and could hardly raise ourselves from the floor, we curled our fingers around the fingers of mother and father, and we looked into their faces as they looked into ours. Where is the word for that?

democracy can make common cause with tyranny quite well, for along with a "manly and lawful passion for equality … there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." It