If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a nostalgic longing for the excitement and joy of learning in childhood.
Horace Mann reflects on the profound joy and thrill he associates with the experience of learning in childhood. He suggests that the 'burning, exalting, transporting thrill' of gaining knowledge during the formative years is so powerful that he would willingly relive his childhood for the sake of experiencing it again. This emphasizes the importance and beauty of knowledge acquisition in early life and highlights how formative experiences shape our understanding and enthusiasm for learning.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the value of education, one might quote Mann to inspire students.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story.
Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind.
There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Investing in better-quality education outcomes - especially in maths and science - more than pays for itself.
The impact of giving someone a connected smartphone is no different from giving them a real computer. I look at how my kids learn and how different it is from how I learned because the impact of these things is just so huge. Sometimes I think we don't fully internalize what it is to get the power of knowledge in everyone's hand.
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