Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
Interpretation
Pursuing truth leads to true greatness.
In this quote, Horace Mann emphasizes the importance of seeking truth rather than chasing after greatness for its own sake. He suggests that by focusing on understanding and embracing truth, one may inadvertently achieve greatness as a byproduct of this pursuit. This underscores the idea that authenticity and integrity are more valuable than the superficial accolades of success.
In practice
This quote could inspire students during a graduation speech about the importance of integrity over accolades.
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.
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact _x000D_ come to know anything.
Life is short and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourself to meditation. Avoid doing evil, and acquire merit, to the best of your ability, even at the cost of life itself. In short: Act so that you have no cause to be ashamed of yourselves and hold fast to this rule.
The truly patient man neither complains of his hard lot nor desires to be pitied by others. He speaks of his sufferings in a natural, true, and sincere way, without murmuring, complaining, or exaggerating them.
A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
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