Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
Interpretation
Emerson suggests that institutions often resist visionary individuals who challenge the status quo.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote highlights the tension between established institutions, such as universities, and innovative thinkers or 'geniuses' who operate outside conventional norms. These institutions, much like churches and monasteries, may feel threatened by the unique perspectives of exceptional individuals, leading to a climate that can be unwelcoming or hostile towards those who seek to redefine or challenge established routines and beliefs.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire graduates to think outside the box.
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?
I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
No one should be held back from realising their potential by fears that they will not be able to afford to go to university or that they will graduate with unmanageable levels of debt.
At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isnβt true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.
Stay curious, keep learning and keep growing. And always strive to be more interested than interesting.
Putting a computer in front of a child and expecting it to teach him is like putting a book under his pillow, only more expensive
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