Quotes from Alan Jacobs

when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves;

The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

If you were to find yourself suddenly and completely isolated from your whole social circle because you no longer believe something that all of them believe, you wouldn't be any less lonely because you could mutter to yourself that they weren't real friends after all. You might even come to think that not-real friends are better than no friends at all.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A

Robinson's analysis. People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have "the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved" will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted.

And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.

So whether you're participating in an online conversation or reading a book by yourself, your experience is a readerly one and a responsive one. The most significant difference is that reading a book is dialogically asymmetrical: you learn about the book, about its characters and perhaps its author, but none of them learns anything about you. I'm not convinced that this is necessarily regrettable: many of us should probably spend more time just listening, rather than insisting on being heard.

What is "secretly present in what he said about anything" is an openness to delight, to the sense that there's more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything.

our dear old bag of a democracy" is sustained, not by itself, but by belief in something deeper and greater than itself.

His students were usually struck first by his appearance: he wore old tweed jackets until they fell apart, kept well into his fifties overcoats that he had inherited from Albert, and, with his ruddy complexion and hearty manner, reminded many students of a grocer or a butcher. But the voice soon captivated them. Little

And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.

God has been born . . . we have seen him ourselves. The World is saved. Nothing else matters.

the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

In most children but in relatively few adults, at least in our time, we may see this willingness to be delighted to the point of self-abandonment. This free and full gift of oneself to a story is what produces the state of enchantment. But why do we lose the desire—or if not the desire, the ability—to give ourselves in this way?

Henry Wallace: "The idea of freedom . . . is derived from the Bible with its extraordinary emphasis on the dignity of the individual. Democracy is the only true political expression of Christianity."39 And Christianity is the only genuine source and sustainer of democracy

if you're part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn't al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it's the Red Tribe." The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate;

It turns out that it is a lot easier to keep believing what everyone around us believes if we ignore or misrepresent the beliefs of our ancestors.

positivists were people without firm moral commitments and therefore without any means of resisting the dogmatic certainties of communism and fascism.

In fact, Hutchins continues, by splitting the human lifeworld in the way they do, positivism and pragmatism leave us with "a colossal confusion of means and ends. Wealth and power become the ends of life," because the realm of value is the realm of opinion, in which I seek nothing more than easy justifications for my desires.

you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don't get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.

Lewis passionately believed that education is not about providing information so much as cultivating "habits of the heart"—producing "men with chests," as he puts it in his book The Abolition of Man, that is, people who not only think as they should but respond as they should, instinctively and emotionally, to the challenges and blessings the world offers to them.