"Their failure is not that they attend only to their own desires—it’s that they do not attend to their own souls."

"Idealism [properly conceived] ... should have primacy in education, for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. . . . As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing."

~ Allan Bloom, from his 1987 book Closing of the American Mind

Hat tip Don Watkins, who comments (in his post on 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Shameful Conversion to Christianity'), 

"This is tragic. And it explains, at a much deeper level, the [false] 'self-centeredness' that you see in those who do not live for a moral ideal. Their failure is not that they attend only to their own desires—it’s that they do not attend to their own souls."