Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.
Interpretation
The people who initially shape our thoughts and beliefs have a significant impact on our lives.
This quote by Horace Mann emphasizes the importance of early influences in shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Those who guide or mentor us at the outset often have a lasting effect on our development and worldview, which underscores the responsibility of educators, leaders, and parents in establishing positive directions for younger minds.
In practice
In a motivational speech about education.
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.
Think of what you have rather than of what you lack. Of the things you have, select the best and then reflect how eagerly you would have sought them if you did not have them.
It is a tricky business to know when you should set goals and objectives in order to achieve a focus, and when you would be better off dealing with the acceptance and management of your current reality so you can later step into new directions and responsibilities with greater stability and clarity. Only you will know the answer to that, and only in the moment.
It's better to be kind than to be right.
When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame, abandoned by a fantasy. β¦People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.
But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.
Do not abandon trust when your ego thinks things should be different than they are.
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