The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
Philip PullmanRead
Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Children may be lacking knowledge but they possess the same intelligence as adults.
This quote emphasizes that children's intelligence is comparable to that of adults; the key difference lies in the level of information they have acquired. It suggests that children have the potential to think and understand complex ideas, but their limited experiences and exposure prevent them from demonstrating their full intellectual capabilities.
Themes
ChildrenIntelligenceEducationKnowledgeInform
In practice
Example use cases
During a school board meeting to advocate for better educational resources.
More from Philip Pullman
All quotes →Education and health were always matters of charity. You educated children and you helped the sick because they were good things to do, not because you were going to make money out of them. If you let the money-making principle, the profit-seeking motive, anywhere near education and health, things go bad.
Philip PullmanRead
To get the best out of life here ...Good grief. There's plenty of it about, so indulge. Give yourself some thing to remember. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Gamble. Get drunk. See how long you can stay awake. Go for long walks at night. Discover what you're afraid of doing, and then do it.
Philip PullmanRead
People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.
Philip PullmanRead
I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.
Philip PullmanRead
Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn’t enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that’s not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.
Philip PullmanRead
Similar quotes
I took a good deal o' pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It's the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.
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Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
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Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.
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Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.
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I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.
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