The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.
Interpretation
Libraries encourage individuals to explore their imagination and pursue knowledge for independence.
This quote emphasizes the role of libraries in cultivating a sense of curiosity and imagination among their users. By honoring their own thirst for knowledge, individuals can achieve intellectual and spiritual independence, which is essential for personal growth and enlightenment.
In practice
During a keynote speech at a literacy conference, to emphasize the importance of libraries in fostering imagination.
That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.
The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.
In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.
Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life.
It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.
I listened more than I studied... therefore little by little my knowledge and ability were developed.
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
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