Anthony Esolen Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;

Anthony Esolen

#6. 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

#7. Our motto instead is, "Work - or do anything at all, so long as you do not pray, or even come to an awareness of your frailty." Turn up the noise.

Anthony Esolen

#8. In other words, man's imagination, when it is not corrupt, yearns for the holy - to behold its beauty from a distance, to be possessed by it. All the greatest art of the past, pagan and Christian, testifies to this desire. It

Anthony Esolen

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. When people accuse us of being retrograde, or medieval, or puritanical - all words rummaged out of the box labeled "Not Progressive" - we should shrug, as if they had accused us of walking on two feet, and

Anthony Esolen

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.

Anthony Esolen

#15. The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men "well-rounded," like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man's mysterious encounter with his Creator. To

Anthony Esolen

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. How silly were the idolaters of old, who knelt before the clumsy wooden figurines of their own making! We are wiser now. We kneel before mirrors.

Anthony Esolen

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new ... Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.

Anthony Esolen