For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.
Interpretation
The mind needs stimulation and inspiration, not mere information, to foster independent thinking.
This quote by Plutarch emphasizes that the process of learning and understanding is not about just accumulating knowledge, as one would fill a bottle, but rather about igniting a spark of curiosity and critical thinking. It suggests that true education involves nurturing an intrinsic motivation to explore the truth and think for oneself, akin to kindling a fire that leads to creative and independent thought.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about innovative teaching methods in education.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.
Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.