Education and Knowledge

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

 

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.

Another ancient and extensive class of languages, united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental, may be denominated the Indo-european, comprehending the Indian, the West Asiatic, and almost all the European languages.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very differentthings, as the history of a science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Any one who has been to an English publicschool will always feel comparatively at home in prison.

Ignorance is more costly to the State than education.

I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I . . . against a lawyer?

The jury . . . may be regarded as a gratuitous public school, ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country.

Scarcely any question arises in the UnitedStates which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate; hence all parties are obliged to borrow the ideas, and even the language usual in judicial proceedings, in their daily controversies. . . . The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate.

You are engineers of human souls.

Backwardly tolerant, Faustus was expelled

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

The most ominous conflict of our time is the difference of opinion, of outlook, between men of letters, historians, philosophers, the so-called humanists, on the one side and scientists on the other. The gap cannot but increase because of the intolerance of both and the fact that science is growing by leaps and bounds.

[ Of Aldous Huxley :] You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he’d been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes, and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.

The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attains years of discretion.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

[ Socrates speaking :] Let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all. . . . When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what “knowing” means.

[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.