This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put into a soul knowledge that was not there before - rather as if they could but sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our argument indicates that this is a capacity which is innate in each man’s soul, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the entire soul must be turned away from this world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which we have called the Good.
Argument | Body | Capacity | Change | Darkness | Education | Good | Knowledge | Light | Man | Reality | Soul | World |
Let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the [child's] natural bent.
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Better | Education | Envy | Good | Ignorance | Imitation | Man | Nature | Power | Suicide | Time | Universe |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
To receive a proper education is the source and root of all goodness.
The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.
Dignity | Education | Fortune | History | Learning | Life | Life | Method | Sense | Study | Training | Vicissitudes |
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess,, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often waste its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.
I believe that our experience instructs us that the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know and what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret.
Education | Experience |
The things taught in school are not an education but the means of an education.
My greatest complaint of education is that it is so loaded with material you never move in the spirit again.
We see processes like love and education as established circumstances rather than as complex temporal organisms whose lives depend on regular nourishment and renewal.... Like still cameras, our minds consistently convert motion into stasis.
Circumstances | Education | Love |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which they took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education - what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.