Ignoramuses and blockheads find it easy and pleasant to criticize the backwardness and darkness of the Middle Ages and the periods of antiquity. Such criticism gives them the feeling of being on a superior plane altogether, of having truth where these earlier, and consequently unluckier, forebears had error.
I personally do not take such a silly attitude. I criticize the past without denying its possession of spiritual treasures. The modern student should revere the teachers and study the teachings of antiquity. He will honour the lives and treasure the words of Jesus and Buddha, Krishna and Confucius, Muhammed, Plato, and Plotinus alike. But he should not confine himself to any single one of them alone nor limit himself within any single traditional fold. He must also lift himself out of the past into the present. He must reserve his principal thought, time, and strength for living teachers and contemporary teaching.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 3 : Its Requirements > # 146
