Quotes from Anthony M. Esolen

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

Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People

The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.

the phrase "stay-at-home mom" is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like "stick-in-the-mud mom" or "sit-in-the-corner mom." Do we talk about a "chained-to-the-desk mom" or a "stuck-in-traffic mom" or a "languishing-in-meetings mom"?

But it is often easier to compel a hundred people to do what you could never compel one person to do. The lone man must consult his conscience, that stern and unflattering arbiter. A man in a crowd, though, can turn to the others, as the others turn to one another, each justifying the deed by referring to the next man, or to the force of all the men together. This

Truly tolerant people are hard to offend.

Every encounter with human truth—Jane Austen deftly showing how little we know our own motives; Dickens revealing the meaning of "economy" in the cheerful and charitable housekeeping of Esther Summerson, his finest heroine; or Shakespeare offering us the foolish Lear, mad and childish and yet "every inch a king"—can expand the soul; it helps to set us free from the common delusions of our time, the lies we believe and the lies we tell. But

after all these programs and scholarships, after all the work done by organized athletics at all levels, the number of boys actually playing baseball or football is far lower than before: no one is outdoors playing.

I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.

To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to justify yourself, you must give yourself over to it all the more.

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

The good man," says Plato, "is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

If you knew there was a beach where you could pick up gold nuggets like pebble stones, would you not go there? Go there.

People who can organize themselves and accomplish something as devilishly complicated as a good ballgame are hard to herd around. They can form societies of their own. They become men and women, not human resources. They can be free.

People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures, rather than being bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body to work upon, will prove difficult to persuade in the coming century of the biotechnocrats.

They do not seek "safety." They seek to destroy.

Senior came to learn that the Catholic Church respected the integrity and the goodness of the created order, and that her teachers would say, with Saint Thomas Aquinas, that the grace of God perfects nature rather than supplants it, and that all of our knowledge, including what we know about God himself, comes to us first through the senses.

It is intellectually and spiritually incoherent to believe in the innocent play of children when you are willing to sacrifice them upon the altar of your ambition, your avarice, your lusts, or your convenience. You cannot suppress the reality of the child without amputating your humanity and searing the wound with bitumen and pitch. The

the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and the people who use them are tools, and so are the people upon whom they are used.

stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

To say to young people, "There are no such things, really, as beauty and goodness," is to do far worse than to fail to direct them out of the cave and into the sun. It is to cut out the hearts of those who might still be minded to make that pilgrimage. It is worse than to fail to direct the ship of the soul by the constant star of the North. It is to tear the tiller out of the ship entirely and leave it at the mercy of the winds, and to call the aimlessness "freedom.

The sky suggests the vastness of creation and the smallness of man's ambition. It startles us out of our dreams of vanity, it silences our pride, it stills the lust to get and spend. It is more dangerous for a human soul to fall into than for a human body to fall out of.

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.