We do ourselves the most good doing something for others.
Interpretation
Helping others contributes to our own well-being and personal growth.
Horace Mann's quote emphasizes the intrinsic value of altruism, suggesting that engaging in acts of kindness and support for others not only benefits them but also enriches our own lives. This idea reflects the interconnectedness of humanity, where the welfare of others is inherently tied to our own happiness and fulfillment.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might say, 'As Horace Mann wisely pointed out, we do ourselves the most good doing something for others.'
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.
We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.
If people say Jeet Kune Do is different from this or from that, then let the name of Jeet Kune Do be wiped out, for that is what it is, just a name. Please don't fuss over it.
The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.
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