The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.
Interpretation
The state of the earth and human intellect depends on whether we nurture them or let them grow wild.
Horace Mann compares the cultivation of the earth to the development of the human intellect, suggesting that both require care and attention to thrive. If we neglect our intellectual growth, just as we can neglect a garden, we may fall victim to negativity and stagnation, represented metaphorically by weeds and brambles.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote this to emphasize the need for nurturing young minds.
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.
Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.
My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
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