Quotes to inspire and reflect

We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The vine that has been made to bear fruit in the spring, withers and dies before autumn.

Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.

Nature without learning is blind, learning apart from nature is fractional, and practice in the absence of both is aimless.

Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education.

A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Oh, children, growing up to be / Adventurers into sophistry, / Forbear, forbear to be of those / That read the rood to learn the rose.

Once you have the cap and gown all you need do is open your mouth. Whatever nonsense you talk becomes wisdom and all the rubbish, good sense.

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will.

That which any one has been long learning unwillingly, he unlearns with proportionable eagerness and haste.

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

Laws and rules of conduct are for the state of childhood; education is an emancipation.

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education.

What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end.

There’s a new tribunal now / Higher than Gods— the educated man’s!

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

At the climax, you were lit up with a quiet ecstasy, which enveloped your blessed body in a supernatural nimbus, like a cloak that you pierced with your head and feet.

the high cost of / living isnt so bad if you / dont have to pay for it.

Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy, / And

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort.

Life in the [London] suburb is richer at the lower levels. At these levels the people are not self-conscious at all, they are at liberty to be as eccentric as they please, they do not know that they are eccentric.

More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.

Seeing is deceiving. It’s eating that’s believing.

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

I have known many meat eaters to be far more non-violent than vegetarians.

It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.

That all-softening, overpowering knell, / The Tocsin of the Soul—the dinner-bell.

Earth being so good, would Heaven seem best?

Let me enjoy the earth no less / Because the all- enacting Might / That fashioned forth its loveliness / Had other aims than my delight.

The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.

There’s life alone in duty done, / And rest alone in striving.