Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that institutions often resist those who challenge the status quo, such as exceptional individuals like geniuses or saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the tension between individual brilliance and established institutions. It implies that colleges, much like religious communities, may view innovative thinkers as threats to their traditional structures and norms. Rather than embracing unique insights or transformative ideas, they may instead prefer conformity, leading to an environment that can stifle creativity and exceptional talent.
In practice
In a graduation speech to encourage students to embrace their uniqueness.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
I always tell my students: I don't care which side you're on. I respect you too much to try to persuade you in 120 minutes a week, much less lure you into pretending that you agree with me. All I want is for you to own this democracy, to see yours, to have a stake in it.
To read great books does not mean one becomes βbookishβ; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.
For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.
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