Quotes from Michael Oakeshott

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

In political activity . . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

I have wasted a lot of time living.

There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.' Ruskin

A so-called ideal scheme which does not grow out of reality is definitely and finally not ideal at all.

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.

For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

To theorize' means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning.

Education is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs and so forth; it is learning to look, to listen, to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe, to understand, to choose and to wish.

England in August 1914 was more of a state than she was during the great industrial strikes of 1911–1912.

the first rule of Moritz Haupt for interpreting the classics,—'Man soll nicht übersetzen.' ['Do not translate':

Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in the process of learning.

The process of experiencing is well described by Goethe when he says that our life is made up of our connections with the world about us, and that we must each spin our own web and sit at the centre to catch what we can.[21] The web itself is made up of past experiences, and each new connection with the world about us, in so far as it is fully known and understood, is an addition to that web, and so an added means of experiencing.

Image the whole, then execute the parts— Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz Ere mortar dab brick!

For there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellence of it, to its neighbours.

a child might possibly change his country; a man can only wish that he might change it.

Browning: 'Justinian's Pandects only make precise / What simply sparkled in men's eyes before'.

We remember the Spartan ambassador who, being asked in whose name he had come, replied: 'In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.' [See Plutarch, 'Lycurgus', Lives, tr. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, nd [1898]), pp. 40–1:

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.