“ There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. Allan Bloom
“ Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence an… Allan Bloom
“ We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structure… Allan Bloom
“ Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to… Allan Bloom
“ I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros. Allan Bloom
“ Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Allan Bloom
“ There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves himself most but w… Allan Bloom
“ The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination...This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper f… Allan Bloom
“ It’s not easy to go through, you happy man, I said. Even more than what we went through before, it admits of many doubts. For, it could be doubted that the things said are possible; and, even if, in t… 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
“ The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers...of all men to the extent they des… Allan Bloom
“ 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
“ Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the e… Allan Bloom
“ There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display. Allan Bloom
“ These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. Allan Bloom
