There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
T. S. EliotRead
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education empowers individuals to rise above the limitations imposed by their current societal context.
In this quote, T. S. Eliot suggests that the purpose of education is not merely to adapt to the present time, but to liberate us from the constraints that our era might impose on our thinking and feelings. By broadening our intellectual horizons and emotional understanding, education equips us to transcend the limitations that our contemporary society may place upon us.
Themes
EducationLimitationsIntellectualFreedomGrowthSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a graduation speech, a speaker might use this quote to emphasize the transformative power of education.
More from T. S. Eliot
All quotes →Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
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I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
T. S. EliotRead
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. EliotRead
For I have known them all already, known them all— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
T. S. EliotRead
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
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Similar quotes
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.
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.. we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.
Nicola GriffithRead
Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
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I'm pretty omnivorous - in fact, I don't think of books in terms of genres. J. K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books are no more Y.A. reading, to me, than John le Carre's 'Smiley' novels are spy stories.
Michiko KakutaniRead