6. Favorite quotes

[Manuel]

Share your favorite quote or scene from the book. Explain why it is meaningful to you.

[Jill]

ch. 1 "Anything in motion takes its meaning from the end; we are creatures in motion and defined by our desires; what we long for is truth. Aimless action self-destructs."
ch. 2 quoting Burke, "'Happiness is to want little.'--that is, less of things and therefore more of truth, beauty, mirth merriment and friendship."
"Have an experiment in merriment."
ch. 3 "Everyone is always saying love, love, love. Exhortation gives us guilty feelings but doesn't teach us what it is or how to do it."
"The one certain thing about the future is that it is full of surprises."
"Work needs prayer as dry cracked leather needs oil; prayer fills the pores of work and makes it flexible, useful to God."
"A poem always explains by making things less clear, like gauze covering a wound."
ch. 4
"The rage for novelty and informality in everything today is a sure sign of our spiritual emptiness."
"Faith, like science, without intelligence is magic."
ch. 6 "As in 'percussion' or 'concussion,' a 'discussion' is the striking against each other of several personal attempts at truth--it is the energetic exercise of several intelligences together tumbling on a darkling trampoline."
ch. 7 "Fanatics never laugh because they are exclusive; they think they are the only ones and, losing their sense of place, lose their sense of proportion."
"The semiconscious, ordinary actions which come under the category of manners are the cultural seed-bed of morals."

[Mariangel]

Ch 2: "A people who live for themselves will not die for each other; they become slaves of those who care so much for something greater than themselves that they will die for it, if not each other; and when that something greater is a person, such a death is then the definition of a famous, much abused word: Love is the death of one's self for the person he loves."

"A silly slogan like "the medium is the message" tickles our complacency; and pop art, the indecent exposure of our souls, is the expression of our highest aspiration" (And this was before facebook)

[Mariangel]

Ch 5. "Those whose work is in the liberal arts and sciences, as students and professors, must blush to be reminded that it is only to the just, gazing in rapt silence like a lover on his beloved at the art or thing, it is only to the patient, silent, receptive listener, that the meaning of the poem, or the mystery of the number, star, chemical, plant -whatever subject the science sits at the feet of- is revealed; whereas it was Bertrand Russell who summed up the arrogance of his technocratic clique in saying the function of science is "to make nature sit up and beg."

"Ausculta, O fili, precepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui. Hear, my son the precepts of the teacher, and incline the ear of thy heart". This means students must love their teachers and teachers must be worthy of such love. Learning is a motion of the heart and not a contract in the marketplace of ideas, where the natural desires of youth to reach the stars are distracted from their aim by catalogues, orientation sessions and academic advising impelling them to marketable skills.

[Mariangel]

"This means that the purpose of study is not to work out "a philosophy of one's own," as is often said, but to learn philosophy. According to the Benedictine view, against the prevalent establishment, and exactly consonant with that of Socrates, St. Thomas and Cardinal Newman, the purpose of a university is not - I say it sweetly, with reverent reserve- the purpose of a university is not research but friendship."

""In my own direct experience teaching literature at universities, I have found a large plurality of students who find, say, Treasure Island what they call “hard reading”, [...] painful decoding of hard sentences as if you were reading Latin. […] To cope somewhat with this, I tried to get college students at the age of twenty to fill in children’s books they should have read at four, eight, ten and twelve- and discovered deeper still that the problem isn’t only books; it isn’t only language; it’s things: It is experience itself that has been missed. […] There is no amount of reading, remedial or advanced, no amount of study of any kind, that can substitute for the fact that we are a rooted species, rooted through our senses in the air, water, earth and fire of elemental experience. […] Children need direct, everyday experience of fields, forests, streams, lakes, oceans, grass and ground so they spontaneously sing with the psalmist

Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and ye deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, stormy winds…"

[Mariangel]

"Learning is not for the sake of enquiry, enquiry is for the sake of learning truth. Even the best colloquium without certitudes to guide it is like the endless dialogue Dante describes so vividly and sadly in the Limbo of the good pagans, among those mild, luminous souls who, severed eternally from Truth, forever seek what they can never find, of whom Virgil, himself one of their number, says senza speme vivemo in disio, without hope we live in desire. The whole passage at the start of the Inferno constitutes an exact description of Columbia’s colloquium."