"The colleges, while they provide us with..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?”
“More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism.”
“The intelligent have a right over the ignorant; namely, the right of instructing them.”
More on Education
“Education and morals make the good man, the good statesman, the good ruler.”
“The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.”
“Just been talking today out here to all the Senators investigating these stock swindles and overcapitalizations. There has been hundreds of millions lost. There ought to be some form of guardianship for people that buy all this junk. Education won't do it. The buyers are the ones we have educated up till they are just smart enough to fall for everything that comes along.”
More on Knowledge
“There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.”
“If you don't know the life yet, how could be possible for you to know the death?”
“Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.”