32 Quotes by Alan Jacobs

About some things – about many things! – we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

If everything is a matter of opinion, and if everybody is entitled to his own opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion.

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.

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value”; but it was tragically wrong “in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”16.

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.

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.

By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

And he encourages Lewis to take the same chance he is taking, to count on the “perchance.” And Lewis did. For the rest of his life he was a champion of the knowledge-giving power of myth, fantasy, Faery.

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.