"When we are young, we spend much..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
More on Learning
“The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.”
“Life without learning is death.”
“What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?”
More on Life
“Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.”
“Your attitude is like the minds paintbrush. It can paint everything in bright, vibrant colors-creating a masterspiece.”
“We go through our lives in a continual dance of being filled with something that needs an answer, and then going out and finding that answer... only to find out that our answer wasn't quite the answer.”