We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.
Alexandre DumasRead
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Interpretation
Education can sometimes diminish natural intelligence and curiosity found in childhood.
This quote by Alexandre Dumas suggests a paradox in human development where children, who display inherent intelligence and curiosity, seem to become less intelligent as they grow older, potentially due to the constraints and rigidities imposed by the educational systems they encounter. Dumas implies that formal education may dampen the innate quest for knowledge and creativity that children naturally possess.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the flaws in traditional education systems.
We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.
There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.
I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please.
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.
It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising
The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.
Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death.
Libraries are not just for reading in, but for sociable thinking, exploring, exchanging ideas and falling in love. They were never silent. Technology will not change that, for even in the starchiest heyday of Victorian self-improvement, libraries were intended to be meeting places of the mind, recreational as well as educational.
For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?
I was a voracious reader and the library fed my curiosity, imagination and my soul. I read by the shelf - biographies, fantasy - all and everything fed my dreams. Then as an adult whenever I would go on location the first thing we would do as a family is sign up at the closest library. Not only would we find books, but what was happening in that town, because the library is the head of the community.
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.
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