A Quote by Max Lerner

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.
Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.
Man has wanted to look beyond, wanted to expand himself; and all that we call progress, evolution, has been always measured by that one search, the search for human destiny, the search for God.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.
A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.
Decision is often the difference between greatness and mediocrity. In every man's life there comes a time when he must search for a cause, a work, an ideal to which he can give himself. Whether he says 'Yes' or 'No' to the challenge will determine his future.
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.
....Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
Some places, because of their spiritual history, are noted to be locations where people will often experience an open heaven. In fact, there are places where the heavens are open more than in other places. Most of you are familiar with previous moves of God in places such as Toronto (The Toronto Blessing), the meetings in Pensacola, and Argentina, just to name a few. Just like in Jacob's day, today, there are certain places where heaven is open, geographical locations where you are more likely to have an encounter with God.
A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.
For centuries, man believed that the sun revolves around the earth. Centuries later, he still thinks that time moves clockwise.
A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.
Education has a tremendous power on man. Can't we see to which astonishing disciple the people of Sparte have submitted ("s'est plié", Fr.) for centuries, and this with a view to very petty purposes: purely outer greatness, the military predominace of Sparte. This example proves that man can everything on themselves when they want it ("peuvent tout sur eux-mêmes quand ils le veulent", Fr.); therefore it would only be a question of making them will the good.
A man's true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent self-examinations, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be right, without troubling himself about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not that which he thinks and says and does.
A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe.
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