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.
Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.
A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.
The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.
We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.