The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
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.
The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art.
A lot of people in line at the grocery store think that they know me, but they don't.
We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
If you won't believe in yourself, who will?
No matter which word it is, when I pronounce repeatedly, it ends up sounding utterly ridiculous and meaningless to me.