Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Anatole FranceRead
Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.
Interpretation
Encouraging curiosity is more effective than overwhelming others with information.
Anatole France emphasizes the importance of igniting curiosity in others rather than simply imparting vast amounts of knowledge. By inspiring a thirst for discovery and understanding, we enable the potential for deeper learning and personal growth, much like kindling a fire that can lead to greater enlightenment on its own.
In practice
In a classroom setting, a teacher might use this quote to emphasize the importance of engaging students rather than lecturing them.
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned
There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.
...Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou Academy had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites...It hadn't been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her (my mother); there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps' boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race).
Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego.
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.
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