Joseph Epstein

The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

There is no word equivalent to 'cuckold' for women.

It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.

For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.

Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.