Top 42 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #2014
#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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #99276
#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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #114541
#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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #164030
#5. Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #319728
#6. 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.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #345625
#7. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #358877
#8. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #429013
#9. What can chastity or purity even mean, once you have smiled at sodomy?

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #481057
#10. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #514302
#11. On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #545199
#12. 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.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #686979
#13. The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #710231
#14. They do not seek "safety." They seek to destroy.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #822983
#15. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #823417
#16. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #838161
#17. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #886247
#18. 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.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #908329
#19. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #914243
#20. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #948948
#21. 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"?

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1036484
#22. 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

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1080989
#23. Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1159832
#24. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1167116
#25. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1173569
#26. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1179713
#27. Our freedom is a personal freedom only when, in it and through it, our persons may flourish, but that is so only in love.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1200282
#28. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1246301
#29. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1348323
#30. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1358640
#31. After years of watching the comic face of nihilism, your children will come to respect nothing, love nothing, believe in nothing, and long for nothing.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1515078
#32. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1522163
#33. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1534897
#34. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1549716
#35. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1563201
#36. We see then that the principle of sexual autonomy is fundamentally antisocial. It not only retreats from social responsibility; it breeds social irresponsibility.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1654241
#37. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1659993
#38. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1663081
#39. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1748011
#40. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1829171
#41. 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

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1838575
#42. 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.

Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony Esolen Quotes #1867240

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