12 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

Those who separate themselves from love, hardening their hearts as they grasp for power or wealth or fame, must separate themselves from the ground of their being. To fail to love is to destroy oneself.

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.

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 hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.

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

If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.