Climbing above what we are...

Political ideals of equality, Lewis said, may be necessary. But he, like Aristotle before him, drew the valuable distinction between the "education which democrats like" and "the education which will preserve democracy." For close up they face the world differently. One allows us to recline and feel good about ourselves; the other quickens us, out of a sense of our innate unfitness and incompleteness, to climb above what we are and rise to that which we might become.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, p.154