Of course I am proud when I recognise that Antonio Vivaldi's Winter or Ravel's Bolero are playing in a café or any other place. The same when I hear someone say by chance "let me analyse it, I'll think about it and tell you", it gives me pleasure to know that we owe the first verb to Moore and Russell, and the second to Descartes.
It cost me decades of study, of investing in books, of incalculable time watching documentaries and conferences, why shouldn't I feel proud of what cost me so much effort?

I know that I am a great ignoramus, like all of us, and that effort only results in being a little less ignorant: it is of this subtraction that I am proud.
We live in a wrong society, we publish the bad things (gossip, news reports, blunders), but when someone makes public an achievement we label them as egocentric and vain. I think we should work to change that.

We have become accustomed to seeing and hearing mediocre musicians, mediocre journalists, mediocre politicians. And why? Because we tolerate idiocy, pettiness and chatter, but we censure the serious, the cautious, the one who takes his time to respond, the one who suddenly justifies his position with reason and not with shouting, vulgar language or insults.

Of course I am not a better person than my father who had no idea who Borges was, his life was cigarettes, cards and wine: and he was the best friend that life could have given me. He did not give a damn about Mozart, and I would never think of censuring him for it, just as I would not allow him to talk to me about classical music.
I am proud to have read Ulysses, to have studied Kant and to know the works of Felini and Korsakov.

Cultural relativism came to blow us up and make us believe that it is the same to read Don Quixote as not to read it. No. It is not the same. It is not.
Let us not allow ourselves to be made to feel guilty about our efforts. Knowledge is valuable, that is to say: fighting every day against our own ignorance is a noble and necessary struggle.