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?
Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.
To improve at chess you should in the first instance study the endgame.
Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.
The giving of love and understanding is an education in itself.
Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.
The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.
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