Educator Quotes

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

“To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.”

“The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.”

“The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.”

“So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.”

“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”

“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”

“Act the part and you will become the part.”

“We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.”

“No decision is, in itself, a decision.”

“Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.”

“Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.”

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

“Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.”

“Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.”

“Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.”

“It is your friends who make your world.”

“There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.”

“Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.”

“a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries”

“The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.”

“Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.”

“Instinct leads, logic does but follow.”

“A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.”

“The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.”