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.
Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at meanspirited roadhouses.
In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional... What a special case I was.
One of the few graces of getting old - and God knows there are few graces - is that if you've worked hard and kept your nose to the grindstone, something happens: The body gets old but the creative mechanism is refreshed, smoothed and oiled and honed. That is the grace. That is what's happening to me.
A boy told me if he roller-skated fast enough his loneliness couldn't catch up to him, the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion. What I wonder tonight pedaling hard down King William Street is if it translates to bicycles. A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.
Do not go to the garden of flowers!_x000D_ O friend! go not there;_x000D_ In your body is the garden of flowers._x000D_ Take your seat on the thousand petals of the_x000D_ lotus, and there gaze on the infinite beauty.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
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