“Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”
―
Anthony Esolen,
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“...friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Man is not only that creature that forges tools, that reasons, and that walks upright. Man is the creature that looks up. Man praises.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.” ― Anthony Esolen
“How silly were the idolaters of old, who knelt before the clumsy wooden figurines of their own making! We are wiser now. We kneel before mirrors.” ― Anthony Esolen, Reflections on the Christian Life
“And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God— made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“In a pit of mud, everyone looks like everyone else. It is the clean who are distinct. In a mob, everyone behaves like everyone else. It is the friend who is distinct.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.” ― Anthony Esolen
“For in those days I had no idea that many of the greatest books are like a forest, and that the best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything around for people to believe in, in our day, is the State. We might put it this way. We should substitute for the wonder of the imagination the irritable flush of political partisanship. We should accept the maxim that all human endeavor is ultimately about power. Therefore education is about power. So is art.” ― Anthony Esolen
“We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new...Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.” ― Anthony Esolen
“If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.” ― Anthony Esolen
“Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men “well-rounded,” like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man’s mysterious encounter with his Creator. To” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“Nearly all the school subjects lay great stress on information. But literature makes its appeal to the heart as well as the intellect. Geography” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People” ― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
“Until the sexual revolution, most people understood that customs and laws regarding sex were customs and laws to strengthen or at least to protect the family, and that the family was not something created by the State, but was its own small kingdom, a natural society, founded in the bodily nature of man.” ― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity
“...friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Man is not only that creature that forges tools, that reasons, and that walks upright. Man is the creature that looks up. Man praises.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.” ― Anthony Esolen
“How silly were the idolaters of old, who knelt before the clumsy wooden figurines of their own making! We are wiser now. We kneel before mirrors.” ― Anthony Esolen, Reflections on the Christian Life
“And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God— made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“In a pit of mud, everyone looks like everyone else. It is the clean who are distinct. In a mob, everyone behaves like everyone else. It is the friend who is distinct.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.” ― Anthony Esolen
“For in those days I had no idea that many of the greatest books are like a forest, and that the best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything around for people to believe in, in our day, is the State. We might put it this way. We should substitute for the wonder of the imagination the irritable flush of political partisanship. We should accept the maxim that all human endeavor is ultimately about power. Therefore education is about power. So is art.” ― Anthony Esolen
“We think that mercy is a sweeter and easier thing than justice, but it is not so; for justice takes us as we are, but mercy assaults us and batters at the gates of our heart, demanding that we be made new...Sometimes sorrow is easier than joy, and despair more comforting that hope.” ― Anthony Esolen
“If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.” ― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
“We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.” ― Anthony Esolen
“Virtue humanizes and spiritualizes what is part animal in us. Vice brutalizes what is human and spiritual in us.” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men “well-rounded,” like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man’s mysterious encounter with his Creator. To” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“Nearly all the school subjects lay great stress on information. But literature makes its appeal to the heart as well as the intellect. Geography” ― Anthony Esolen, Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
“Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People” ― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
“Until the sexual revolution, most people understood that customs and laws regarding sex were customs and laws to strengthen or at least to protect the family, and that the family was not something created by the State, but was its own small kingdom, a natural society, founded in the bodily nature of man.” ― Anthony Esolen, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity
