The complete collection
A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.
These possibilities of mental development are still further increased when the man makes his own records. This leads to closer attention, to more interest in the work, and to a realization of the man as to what the record really means, and what value it represents.
It is not always recognized that the work itself is a great educator, and that acute cleverness in the line of work to which he is fitted comes to the worker.
if it has in store any of what I may call the food of study and philosophy, nothing can be pleasanter than an old age of leisure
a man who is always living in the midst of these studies and labours does not perceive when old age creeps upon him
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception.
The fundamental principle of scientific pedagogy must be, indeed, the liberty of the pupil;--such liberty as shall permit a development of individual, spontaneous manifestations of the child's nature.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!
Wrongly attributed
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.
They may be truths to me, but don’t think that that makes them mine… because you can’t own a truth.
There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
All sincere and earnest search after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet, often comes so near to it, that other minds more happily situated may be led, by pointing out its very limitations and errors, to obtain a larger view.
the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market
It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.
But music never has to depend upon any obvious meaning; it expresses what no words can ever express.
For joy is knowledge in its completeness, it is knowing by our whole being.
The meaning of the living words that come out of the experiences of great hearts can never be exhausted by any one system of logical interpretation.
For we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us.
the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing
For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.
Wrongly attributed
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel is printed on university walls under Socrates's name. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and the sentence is not in Plato either. It is Plutarch, four hundred years later, in the Moralia essay usually called On Listening to Lectures -- and it is not an aphorism about education but a rebuke to a student who sits and admires the lecturer instead of thinking. Note what the tidy modern version loses: Plutarch does not say the mind is a flame to be kindled, he says it is not a pot, and that what it wants is fuel.
The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy.