Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
Interpretation
Creativity should be approached with a mindset that allows for imperfection and freedom of expression.
In this quote, Jacques Barzun emphasizes the importance of treating your work as a malleable process rather than a fixed and final creation. By likening work to clay, he encourages individuals to allow for experimentation and mistakes, suggesting that initial ideas do not need to be perfect and should be permitted to evolve over time.
In practice
During a workshop, to encourage participants to share their unrefined ideas, one might say, 'Remember, you are working in clay, not marble!'
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little
It is more important to outhink your enemy, than to outfight him
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect.
Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.
Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
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