Leo Strauss Quotes

I want to be remembered as a poet, a peacemaker, and a philosopher who played.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Never before in the history of the modern research university have entire departments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits.

(Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.

The Holy Scriptures surpass in efficaciousness all the arts and all the sciences of the philosophers and jurists; these, though good and necessary to life here below, are vain and of no effect as to what concerns the life eternal.

Management is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right-brain activity. It's more of an art it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues.

According to the saying of an ancient philosopher, one should eat to live, and not live to eat

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

To understand a philosopher requires a philosopher.

The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's 'The Devils' no less than the art of Giotto or the 'Passions' of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.

Can an ass be tragic?--To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.

In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.

The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.

On this point, the priest and the philosopher agree: We must die.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all. Bertha: What's that? Socrates: Philosophy. Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here. Socrates: Where are they? Bertha: In the philosophy department. Socrates: Philosophy is not department. Bertha: Well, we have philosophers. Socrates: Are they dangerous? Bertha: Of course not. Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers.

In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.