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?
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
The real role of leadership in education ... is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
write what readers want to read, which isnβt necessarily what you want to write.
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