Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that institutions often resist those who challenge the status quo, such as exceptional individuals like geniuses or saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote reflects the tension between individual brilliance and established institutions. It implies that colleges, much like religious communities, may view innovative thinkers as threats to their traditional structures and norms. Rather than embracing unique insights or transformative ideas, they may instead prefer conformity, leading to an environment that can stifle creativity and exceptional talent.
In practice
In a graduation speech to encourage students to embrace their uniqueness.
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?
Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
All I ever wanted to do was to make food accessible to everyone; to show that you can make mistakes - I do all the time - but it doesn't matter.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser.
Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.
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