The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
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Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.
To not only take risks, but to be open to life. To accept new views and to be open to new opinions.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.
But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.
It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.
Sometimes you have to take risks to see how far you can go. Comfort zone keeps you trapped in the same stagnant place. If you don't take a chance you will never explore your potential. Be ok with failure. Be ok with mistakes. They are part of the process.
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Practice makes perfect.
Two heads are better than one.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
Wrongly attributed
Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!
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.
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.