Allan Bloom Quotes

IdleHearts / Quotes by Allan Bloom

Enjoy the best inspirational, motivational, positive, funny and famous quotes by Allan Bloom. Use words and picture quotations to push forward and inspire you keep going in life!

Image, We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to

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We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

—Allan Bloom

Image, The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength,

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The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

—Allan Bloom

Image, The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst

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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.

—Allan Bloom

Image, There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the

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There are two threats to reason, the opinion that one knows the truth about the most important things and the opinion that there is no truth about them. Both of these opinions are fatal to philosophy; the first asserts that the quest for truth is unnecessary, while the second asserts that it is impossible. The Socratic knowledge of ignorance, which I take to be the beginning point of all philosophy, defines the sensible middle ground between two extremes.

—Allan Bloom

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Image, Most of all I admire Mozart’s capacity to be both deep and

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Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

—Allan Bloom

Image, The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites

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The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.

—Allan Bloom

Image, Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth

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Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

—Allan Bloom

Image, Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with

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Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.

—Allan Bloom

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The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

—Allan Bloom

Image, The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens

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The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

—Allan Bloom

Image, Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst

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Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

—Allan Bloom

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

—Allan Bloom

Image, There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in

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There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

—Allan Bloom

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Image, Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not.

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Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

—Allan Bloom

Image, Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the

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

—Allan Bloom

Image, Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our

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Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

—Allan Bloom

Image, As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off

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As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.