The complete collection
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.
Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.
a man who is always living in the midst of these studies and labours does not perceive when old age creeps upon him
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
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.
Then let them eat pastry!
Wrongly attributed
Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said this. Rousseau wrote the anecdote in his Confessions about an unnamed great princess; he had drafted the passage by 1767, when Marie Antoinette was eleven years old and still in Austria. The line was attached to her name decades later. Note the wording: this 1782 translation of the Confessions renders the French brioche as pastry; the familiar English form, let them eat cake, is a later translator's choice.
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.
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.
I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.
I try to scare myself at least once a day.
They may be truths to me, but don’t think that that makes them mine… because you can’t own a truth.
It’s just as important where we are not as it is where we are.
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.
Nations, like individuals in a state of nature, are equal and independent, possessing certain rights and owing certain duties to each other, arising from their necessary and unavoidable relations; which rights and duties there is no common human authority to protect and enforce.
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.
it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker
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.
All our egoistic impulses, our selfish desires, obscure our true vision of the soul.