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.
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.
I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it.
One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.
It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.
It seems to me of great importance to teach children respect for life.
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