Quotes by Anthony M. 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 m...”

“The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.”

“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.”

“For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.”

“[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', ...”

“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 ...”

“For the first time in human history, most people are doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along. That says less about the child than about us.”

“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...”

“How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what differenc...”

“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 s...”

“We would or at least we should take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.”

“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.”

“You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a he...”

“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.”

“We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.”