Anthony Esolen Quotes

Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates; ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

And, at the same time, we began to build schools that are all inside and no outside, all stone and no garden, all power and no humility, all hulking system and no small child, all gears and no flowers, all compulsion and no promise. ~ Anthony Esolen

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [ ... ] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do ... you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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? ~ Anthony Esolen

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful. ~ Anthony Esolen

We don't actually want our young people to encounter the mysteries of love anyway; best to keep them preoccupied with the tedium of lust instead. The ~ Anthony Esolen

It is precisely because we believe in democracy as a talisman, a heal-all, that we are prone to the disintegration of language that characterizes Life Under Compulsion. It ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

The early Christians saw the connections quite clearly, which is why they set themselves apart from the licentiousness. They did not frequent houses of prostitution, they did not divorce, they did not kill their babies, and they did not engage in sexual perversion. ~ Anthony Esolen

How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion. ~ Anthony Esolen

For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us. ~ Anthony Esolen

But if the line is drawn farther off, or not drawn at all, then the homosexual must go ever further for the same thrill of transgression. He must invent new methods, new combinations. Not content with merely inserting his organ of generation in the place of evacuation and uncleanness, he has to insert his fist there too - and we are subjected to the absurdity of school officials nodding in their superior wisdom as Mr. Savage explains to teenagers that you really can shape your fist so that it won't cause intense pain or tear the rectum or do a host of other things that he won't tell them about, because they involve diseases like hepatitis, and it's best to hide those things from teenagers who are apt to be squeamish about people sneezing on their lunch, let alone invading their intestines. ~ Anthony Esolen

Say that he was right about how bad it was in the Soviet Union, but he just didn't understand the nice materialism of the West. Say that the Soviet Union was bad because the people were deprived of meaningless creature comforts, and that the West is good because the people are flooded with them. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

Justice is only what a "culture," meaning a shifting majority of people, say it is, with a dollop of respect for "human rights" spread on top, without intellectual foundation, and without any connection with virtue and duty. ~ 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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

To put the matter bluntly, no sense at all can be made of the virtue of purity if sodomy is countenanced or even celebrated. That is because the virtue is founded in reality, and the vice depends upon denying the reality. ~ Anthony Esolen

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. ~ Anthony Esolen

Independence. Freedom. Liberty. These have become bywords of our time. And yet we hardly understand the terms at all anymore ... The assumption is now nearly automatic that freedom is without substance. It is an extrinsic condition, and a negative at that. It means that there are no strings upon the autonomous self. It is ... freedom as license, as a permission slip to do as you please. It is freedom that worships the abstraction of choice: choice is the only thing that matters; whether it is one choice or another matters not at all. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

Tolerance is that important but subordinate virtue by which, instructed in our own weakness, we bear with what is bad without pretending that it is good. We bear with it provisionally, even if sometimes there is nothing we can do about it or ever will be able to do about it. It ~ Anthony Esolen

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. ~ Anthony Esolen

It is a mark of a narcissistic age that some Christians have come to interpret these words as suggesting that we make Jesus present by means of our community, when exactly the reverse is the case. The only reason why Christians gather is that Jesus has already united us. We gather not in our names but in His name. It is He who has called us out of the darkness of egoism into His wonderful light. ~ Anthony Esolen

The love of the married man and woman is not a private romance, but a recapitulation of the love that brought them into being in the first place, and that love is what we all duly celebrate. ~ Anthony Esolen

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

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

The only reason why mankind has celebrated marriages is that they renew the race; they bring forth new life, within the bounds of a holy vow. ~ Anthony Esolen

I remember at the age of, and I'll say this, 10 and a half, 11, I had a natural boy soprano. ~ Anthony Warlow

The distance of a voice, is only a short time away from touch. ~ Anthony Liccione

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations. ~ Anthony Burgess

Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering. ~ Anthony De Mello

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You dont change. But when you understand it, it changes. ~ Anthony De Mello

We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process. ~ Anthony Lane

And this real-world approach is called the dollar-weighted return. ~ Anthony Robbins

My finest student, and also my greatest disappointment. ~ Anthony Ryan

Ask Anthony Hopkins how he makes his characters come to life and he just shrugs. I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't be able to do it. As they say: Where ignorance is bliss it's folly to be wise. ~ Larry Eisenberg

Give her the continent and she wanted the hemisphere. ~ Anthony Kiedis

I have wandered freely in mystical traditions that are not religious and have been profoundly influenced by them. It is my church, however, that I keep returning, for she is my spiritual home. ~ Anthony De Mello S.J.

He liked to be kindly treated, to be praised and petted, to be well fed and caressed; and they who so treated him were his chosen friends. He had in this the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog. ~ Anthony Trollope

And I thought to myself, Hell and blast you all, if all you bastards are on the side of Good then I'm glad I belong to the other shop. ~ Anthony Burgess

Maybe becoming a spiritually healthy family is not about becoming a perfect family but rather following a perfect God together. And in doing so, to find peace with Him, our pasts, and our family members. ~ Michelle Anthony

Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests. ~ Anthony Powell

If you can't see the obvious then you must not be looking then. ~ Anthony T. Hincks.

A conductor can't be too arrogant with an orchestra and try to impose himself too much. ~ Anthony Hopkins

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children's intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers' stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion. ~ Dana Goldstein

Sunday is a day just for you. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

purposefully in twos and threes into the streets: ~ Anthony Doerr

When John left the band, I resented him for not being my friend and for abandoning our musical comradeship. But all the time that he was out of the band and going through his anguish, I prayed for him constantly. From going to meetings I'd learned that one of the reasons that alcoholics get loaded is because they harbor resentments. One of the techniques they teach to get rid of a resentment toward somebody is to pray for him or her to get everything that you want for yourself in life-to be loved, to be successful, to be healthy, to be rich, to be wonderful, to be happy, to be alive with the light and the love of the universe. It's a paradox, but it works. You sit there and pray for the person you can't stand to get everything on earth that you would want for yourself, and one day you're like 'I don't feel anything bad toward this person. ~ Anthony Kiedis

Oh bliss, bliss and heaven... Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh... And then, a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now... I knew such lovely pictures - Alex ~ Anthony Burgess

And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions. ~ Anthony Doerr

Name one practical, down-to-earth effect of spirituality," said the skeptic who was ready for an argument. "Here's one," said the Master. "When someone offends you, you can raise your spirits to heights where offenses cannot reach. ~ Anthony De Mello

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. ~ Anthony Trollope

Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice. ~ Anthony Burgess

What's the point of massive achievement if your life has no balance? And what's the point of winning the game if you never take the time to celebrate and appreciate the life you have? There's nothing worse than a rich person who's chronically angry or unhappy. ~ Anthony Robbins

I have absolutely no histrionic talent, none at all, a constitutional handicap in almost all undertakings of life;but then, after all, plenty of actors possess little enough. ~ Anthony Powell

I hate people doing an emotional striptease. It's never genuine or they wouldn't drag outsiders m. ~ Evelyn Anthony

Not one of our national officers ever has had a dollar of salary. I retire on full pay! ~ Susan B. Anthony

There's a very interesting article or symposium to be written on just the real difference between comedy filmmaking and non-comedy. Because, you know, when you work in comedy, you depend on audience screenings to tell you about your movie. ~ Shawn Anthony Levy

The house is seventies modern with sliding windows, gas-effect and a giant TV in the living room. There are almost no books. I'm not making any judgement. It's just the sort of thing I can't help but notice. ~ Anthony Horowitz

The fans are dying. We're dying. ~ Carmelo Anthony

I discovered surfing, which I absolutely fell in love with. That feels good and kind of keeps your body aligned, so does the salt water. ~ Anthony Kiedis

These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn't really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter. ~ Anthony Bourdain

I know I'm not a selfish player. People around me know I'm not a selfish player. I do everything I can to make people around me understand I'm not a selfish player. ~ Carmelo Anthony

I know well the opportunities and the challenges of maintaining and improving infrastructure and providing good transportation choices. ~ Anthony Foxx

Envy, is Pride's greatest Fear. ~ Anthony Liccione

Stop Destroying Shareholder Value ~ Miles Anthony Smith