If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.
Interpretation
Language distinguishes humans from animals, enabling complex communication and thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote emphasizes the importance of language in human development. Without the ability to articulate thoughts and ideas, humanity would remain primitive, lacking the sophisticated communication that advances culture, knowledge, and civilization. Language is not just a tool for communication; it is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human.
In practice
In a speech about education, one might quote this to highlight the role of language in learning.
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?
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
Teaching players during practices was what coaching was all about to me.
What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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