Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
Lionel TrillingRead
Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.
Interpretation
Youth is a formative period where certain books leave lasting impressions on us.
In this quote, Lionel Trilling highlights the idea that the literature we encounter in our youth often shapes our thoughts and identities in profound ways. These books are not just stories; they are experiences that resonate with us deeply, influencing our perspectives and values long after we have read them.
In practice
During a graduation speech, one could use this quote to emphasize the impact of education and reading in shaping character.
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
When schools flourish, all flourishes.
Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
Bureaucratic solutions to problems of practice will always fail because effective teaching is not routine, students are not passive, and questions of practice are not simple, predictable, or standardized. Consequently, instructional decisions cannot be formulated on high then packaged and handed down to teachers.
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
Sport is a very important subject at school, that's why I gave Quidditch such an important place at Hogwarts. I was very bad in sports, so I gave Harry a talent I would really loved to have. Who wouldn't want to fly?
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
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