Education Quote by Harold Bloom

Bloom is selling reading as a form of sanctioned intimacy: a way to outgrow the thin social bandwidth of ordinary life. The opening claim, "we cannot know enough people profoundly enough", is less a lament than a quiet indictment of modern sociability. You can collect acquaintances, scroll personalities, even binge memoirs, but depth is scarce; literature becomes the workaround, a technology for closeness that doesn’t require reciprocity. That’s Bloom the critic: unapologetically hierarchical about what books can do that culture can’t.

Then he pivots to the more difficult proposition: "we need to know ourselves better". The subtext is anti-therapeutic in a very Bloom way. Self-knowledge isn’t achieved by affirmations or identity talk; it’s produced by friction with strong minds, complex characters, and language that refuses to flatter you. Reading "deeply" implies rereading, submitting to difficulty, letting a text revise your sense of your own motives.

The last clause widens the frame into metaphysics: "knowledge... of the way things are". Bloom’s insistence on reality - not just feelings, not just "perspectives" - sits in the long shadow of his battles against theory, trend, and what he saw as the politicization of the canon. In that context, the line functions as a defense of literature’s cognitive authority. Books don’t merely entertain or represent; at their best, they pressure-test your assumptions about human nature and the world’s stubborn constraints. Reading becomes an ethical practice, not because it makes you nicer, but because it makes you less easily fooled.