Leo Strauss - Life Quotes

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By the spirit of revenge, Nietzsche means a very great variety of phenomena. And to some of them he alludes in this speech. In his other writings, he [uses] a French word, ressentiment— which in Nietzsche does not merely mean resentment, but rather the reaction of those who are disadvantaged by nature and/or law against the privileged. And that leads in a deeper stratum to a denial of the superiority of the goodness of the advantages in question, [to a] denigration of those qualities and the longing for the humiliation of these people in this life and in the next.

Leo Strauss
Philosophy has to grant that revelation is possible. But to grant that revelation is possible means to grant that philosophy is perhaps something infinitely unimportant. To grant that revelation is possible means to grant that the philosophic life is not necessarily, not evidently, the right life. Philosophy, the life devoted to the quest for evident knowledge available to man as man, would itself rest on an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision. This would merely confirm the thesis of faith, that there is no possibility of consistency, of a consistent and thoroughly sincere life, without belief in revelation. The mere fact that philosophy and revelation cannot refute each other would constitute the refutation of philosophy by revelation.

Leo Strauss
Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

Leo Strauss
The adjective political in political philosophy designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, political philosophy means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy—the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.

Leo Strauss
To avert the danger [posed by theory] to life, Nietzsche could choose one of two ways: he could insist on the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical analysis of life—that is, restore the Platonic notion of the noble delusion—or else he could deny the possibility of theory proper and so conceive of thought as essentially subservient to, or dependent on, life or fate... If not Nietzsche himself, at any rate his successors [Heidegger] adopted the second alternative.

Leo Strauss
[The philosopher] is ultimately compelled to transcend not merely the dimensions of common opinion, of political opinion, but the dimension of political life as such; for he is left to realize that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy.

Leo Strauss