Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy? – Allan Bloom
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion. – Allan Bloom
Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as mens taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure has become entertainment. – Allan Bloom
The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of potential knowers… of all men to the extent that they know. – Allan Bloom
The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour. – Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers