Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Teaching imparts both knowledge and humility to the teacher.
This quote highlights the dual role of a teacher: on one hand, they serve as a source of knowledge for students, but on the other hand, they gain profound insights about their own identity and place in the world through the act of teaching. It underscores the irony that teachers, who may appear to hold all the answers, often learn the most significant lessons themselves, while some students may fail to learn anything at all.
Themes
TeachingLearningHumilityIronyEducation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of education, one could say, 'He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility.'
More from J. M. Coetzee
All quotes →Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.
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The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
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My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
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The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.
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Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
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