"Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day"

A compact curriculum for a life of aspiration: seek what is lofty by making daily contact with greatness, through reading, hearing, and seeing. The command is simple, but it reshapes time and attention. “Lofty” suggests elevation not of status but of spirit, ideas, forms, and deeds that stretch perception and conscience. To seek it is to reject passive drift and pursue nourishment deliberately.

Reading, hearing, and seeing map the full range of human expression. Reading connects us to minds across centuries; a paragraph of Montaigne or Morrison can recalibrate a day. Hearing opens the door to cadence and presence, Bach, a well-told story, a lecture that clarifies a tangled thought. Seeing draws the intellect through the eye: a painting’s composition, a building’s proportion, a photograph’s captured truth. The mediums differ, but the discipline is the same: submit to work whose excellence disciplines taste, deepens attention, and widens sympathy.

“Some moment every day” matters. Small, consistent exposures accumulate into character. Five honest minutes with something superb outcompete hours of distracted consumption. Habit builds a personal canon, a reservoir for times of confusion or fatigue. It sets a standard against which one’s own efforts are measured, pulling craft upward and pruning vanity. Great work is not a museum piece; it is a mentor.

This practice is also democratic. Greatness is not confined to an elite syllabus. It includes a folk ballad sung cleanly, a paragraph that says exactly what it must, a photograph that tells the truth. The task is curation: to choose intentionally over algorithm, to protect a daily aperture where the best enters and the trivial recedes.

Seek is the crucial verb. Don’t wait to be inspired; go where inspiration lives. Turn stray minutes into apprenticeship. Over time, the soul takes the shape of what it greets, and daily greetings with excellence teach us how to think, to feel, and to make with greater care.