When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound joy and fulfillment that comes from discovering knowledge and truth.
Horace Mann highlights the transformative experience of gaining knowledge and understanding, portraying it as a source of nourishment for the soul. The quote suggests that when individuals, particularly children, engage with truth and knowledge, they experience a taste of something divine and fulfilling, akin to a glimpse of heaven.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about the importance of education in personal development.
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.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
If we want children to learn to tend the land and nourish themselves and have conversations at the table, we need to communicate with them in ways that are positive.
Learning is more effective when it is an active rather than a passive process.
Someday, hopefully very soon, 'diving within' as a preparation for learning and as a tool for developing the creative potential of the mind will be a standard part of every school’s curriculum.
Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.
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