We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.
Interpretation
Books are valued by those who possess wisdom, and the wisest individuals cherish them the most.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the special relationship between wisdom and the appreciation of books. It suggests that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding through reading is both a hallmark of wisdom and a means to cultivate it. Those who are wise recognize the value of books not just as sources of information, but as tools for personal growth and enlightenment.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote Emerson to emphasize how wise individuals value learning.
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?
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Good teachers teach. Great teachers transform.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
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