“Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included.”
"The Magical Value of Manuscripts," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ehop.htm The Hudson Review (Spring 1996); later published as an introduction to The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, ed. Rodney Phillips (1997)
Essays
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Dana Gioia 80
American writer 1950Related quotes

“Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.”
" Quote of the week: William James on theology http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/quote-of-the-week-william-james-on-theology/" June 4, 2012

Comment on establishing the University of Virginia, in a letter to Thomas Cooper (7 October 1814); published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1905) edited by Andrew Adgate Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol VII, p. 200 http://books.google.com/books?id=jrSgJGp-B64C&pg=RA1-PA200&dq=%22A+professorship+of+theology+should+have+no+place+in+our+institution%22&ei=u65FR562EpqCpwLkk9XxBg
1810s
Context: I agree … that a professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution. But we cannot always do what is absolutely best. Those with whom we act, entertaining different views, have the power and the right of carrying them into practice. Truth advances, and error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.

Preface to the Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government of the Province of Pennsylvania in America (5 May 1682).
Frame of Government (1682)

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 237, “Why Free Schools Are Not Free,” analysis, (October 1948)

On the creation of research institutions, in a speech to the Indian National Science Academy (1963), as quoted in the "Homi Jehangir Bhabha" profile at the Vigyan Prasar Science Portal
Context: I feel that we in India are apt to believe that good scientific institutions can be established by Government decree or order. A scientific institution, be it a laboratory or an academy, has to be grown with great care like a tree. Its growth in terms of quality and achievement can only be accelerated to a very limited extent. This is a field in which a large number of mediocre or second rate workers cannot make up for a few outstanding ones, and the few outstanding ones always take at least 10-15 years to grow.
Too many of our National Laboratories have been established by deciding upon the field in which it was desired to work and by drawing up an organisational chart on the pattern of some corresponding large laboratory abroad. It was then assumed naively, that the posts in the chart could be filled by advertisement, forgetting that workers of the appropriate and high level either do not exist in India, or can only be obtained at the cost of some other institution, which thus becomes weaker of it. Our Universities, weak as they always were, have been further weakened in this matter.

Part 1, 1919 - 1968 The Road to 24 Sussex Drive, p. 46
Memoirs (1993)

Accompanying letter https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20070707_lettera-vescovi.html to motu proprio Summorum Pontificum https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_ben-xvi_motu-proprio_20070707_summorum-pontificum.html.
2007