Michael Oakeshott Quotes

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

Michael Oakeshott

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Michael Oakeshott

The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.

Michael Oakeshott

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Michael Oakeshott