Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.
Interpretation
Education reveals the inherent potential within individuals, but external help pales in comparison to self-discovery.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the idea that true education is not merely the transmission of knowledge from others, but rather the process of unfolding one's own innate potential and capabilities. While mechanical assistance from others can be helpful, the most profound learning occurs within oneself through personal experiences and discoveries, which leads to a lasting and fulfilling impact on one's life.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students about self-learning and discovery.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Yeah, I'm a thrill seeker, but crikey, education's the most important thing.
All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent.
With better vision, we sacrifice for students for whom that sacrifice will most likely pay off. I'm sorry to say this, but there are times when even superhuman effort will not save a child from his environment or himself. It's not the job of the teacher to save a child's soul; it is the teachers' job to provide an opportunity for the child to save his own soul.
Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
Every literate woman is a victory over poverty
I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the three first rules in figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day. I should have continued longer if it hadn't been that I concluded I couldn't do any longer without a wife, and so I cut out to hunt me one.
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