42 Quotes About Humanities

Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

We have no use for ablative absolutes in the Navy.

إن القرآن لم يذر وسيلة موصلة إلى إنعاش العقل وتحرير الفكر إلا وتذرع بها، فهو إذا تحاكم فإلى العقل، وإذا حاج فبحكم العقل، وإذا سخط فعلى معطلي العقل، وإذا رضي فعن أولي العقل

If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time.

It is also part of the humanities’ mission to appreciate exceptions: it would be tragic if literary scholars became so infatuated with charts and graphs that they forgot to mention that Wuthering Heights is rather unlike other novels of its time.

when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.

It must be admitted that scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science.... It is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and humanities that characterizes the modern education system.