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Motivational quotes

Encouragement from books, speeches, and lives well lived. Every quote includes its available source and attribution.

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What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!

Mark Twain·Post-Prandial Philosophy, by Grant Allen·1894misattributed

The closing line of an essay arguing that a year in Italy would teach a boy more than three at Oxford.

Wrongly attributed

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.

For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.

Socrates·Of Hearing, in Plutarch's Morals, Volume 1 (corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin)·1878misattributed

The concluding exhortation of the essay on how to listen to a lecture, urging the hearer to supply the rest by his own industry.

Wrongly attributed

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel is printed on university walls under Socrates's name. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and the sentence is not in Plato either. It is Plutarch, four hundred years later, in the Moralia essay usually called On Listening to Lectures -- and it is not an aphorism about education but a rebuke to a student who sits and admires the lecturer instead of thinking. Note what the tidy modern version loses: Plutarch does not say the mind is a flame to be kindled, he says it is not a pot, and that what it wants is fuel.