The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.
Interpretation
The state of the earth and human intellect depends on whether we nurture them or let them grow wild.
Horace Mann compares the cultivation of the earth to the development of the human intellect, suggesting that both require care and attention to thrive. If we neglect our intellectual growth, just as we can neglect a garden, we may fall victim to negativity and stagnation, represented metaphorically by weeds and brambles.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might quote this to emphasize the need for nurturing young minds.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
We do not wish to abolish teaching and to make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God for his teacher.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
I felt like there was something I needed to do - speaking to kids and sharing my story with them and helping them understand racism has no place in the minds and hearts of children.
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
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