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Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

— Allan Bloom

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More quotes by Allan Bloom

Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

The academies and universities satisfied Socrates’ demand to be fed in the prytaneum.

Education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art.

The university ... must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy—the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature.

The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing—in addition to caring for man’s well-being—they were providing rights for themselves.

Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Allan Bloom (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.