Great Throughts Treasury

"And neither mind nor character can be made without a spiritual element. This is just the element that has grown weak, where it has not perished, in our education, and therefore in our civilization, with disastrous results."

"Our danger is not too few, but too many options ... to be puzzled by innumerable alternatives."

"There is no virtue in being uncritical nor is it a habit to which the young are given. But criticism is only the burying beetle that gets rid of what is dead, and, since the world lives by creative and constructive forces, and not by negation and destruction, it is better to grow up in the company of prophets than of critics."

"Theories are more common than achievements in the history of education."

"If the school sends out children with a desire for knowledge and some idea of how to acquire and use it, it will have done its work."

"We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own."

"I doubt if anything learnt at school is of more value than great literature learnt by heart."

"A technician is a man who understands everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and its place in the order of the universe."

"True education is the habitual vision of greatness."

"The young, whether they know it or not, live on borrowed property."