Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

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.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

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?

The real community of man is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

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 structures of which they were once a part.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

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.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

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.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

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.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre Columbian archeology not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

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.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition it is dead.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.

I ask every Communist individually to set an example, by deeds and without pretense, a real example worthy of a man and a Communist, in restoring order, starting normal life, in resuming work and production, and in laying the foundations of an ordered life.

Success in crime always invites to worse deeds.

In great deeds something abides.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

Only the other world has substance and reality; only good deeds and holy learning have tangible worth.

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

It is thought and feeling which guides the universe, not deeds.

So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.

If one begins all deeds well, it is likely that they will end well too.

Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing - where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger; which he knows he was meant and made to do.

Good actions ennoble us, we are the sons of our own deeds.

Great deeds give choice of many tales. Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then let wise men listen.

A key to the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents - America chief among them - by their worst deeds.

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.

No intelligent man believes that anybody ever willingly errs or willingly does base and evil deeds; they are well aware that all who do base and evil things to them unwillingly.

It was not the path I was to take. Because of my deeds, I will never know peace again.

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows.

And now may the blessing of God rest upon all men. I have told unto them the Epic of Kings, and the Epic of Kings is come to a close, and the tale of their deeds is ended.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

Little deeds are like little seeds, they grow to flowers or to weeds.

All I ever seek from good deeds is a measure of respect.