Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
Interpretation
Emerson suggests that institutions often resist visionary individuals who challenge the status quo.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the tension between established institutions, such as universities, and innovative thinkers or 'geniuses' who operate outside conventional norms. These institutions, much like churches and monasteries, may feel threatened by the unique perspectives of exceptional individuals, leading to a climate that can be unwelcoming or hostile towards those who seek to redefine or challenge established routines and beliefs.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire graduates to think outside the box.
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?
I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there's no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.
When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
I think the success of any school can be measured by the contribution the alumni make to our national life.
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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