Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Robert HenriRead
Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.
Interpretation
Education is a personal responsibility, regardless of the quality of the institution.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-directed learning and personal initiative in the educational process. While schools provide valuable resources and opportunities, true education and growth come from the student's own efforts and determination to learn and develop their knowledge and skills.
In practice
During a motivational speech at a high school graduation.
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
You form a society: that limits you. Adopt a name, and you've limited yourself again; draw up a constitution and bylaws and you've made a groove, a rut, that hampers your growth. You think you can fix your course and move straight along it. But sometimes the important thing is to strike out sidewise.
After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.
Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children, who are advantaged, aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who struggled more.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
There's no such thing as a writer's block. If you're having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.
If it is right that schools should be maintained by the whole community for the well-being of the whole, it is right also that libraries should be so maintained.
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