Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.
Interpretation
Education reveals the inherent potential within individuals, but external help pales in comparison to self-discovery.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the idea that true education is not merely the transmission of knowledge from others, but rather the process of unfolding one's own innate potential and capabilities. While mechanical assistance from others can be helpful, the most profound learning occurs within oneself through personal experiences and discoveries, which leads to a lasting and fulfilling impact on one's life.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students about self-learning and discovery.
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?
Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries
To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
....Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
We must always meet our obligation to those who fall behind without our assistance. But let's remember, without a race there can be no champion, no records broken, no excellence - in education or any other walk of life.
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