It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances.
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In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.
Life must needs be disgusting alike to the idle rich man as to the idle poor man, who has no work to do, or, having work, will not do it.
Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point-blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining
If to-day thou art not ready, how shalt thou be ready to-morrow?
Never had I felt confinement less—I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.
We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.
While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest.
Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute.
Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.
Unverified attribution
Wording taken from a viewer's transcription of the video. This is the Dillard address, not the Pennsylvania one: Dillard has published no transcript we could reach — its site returns 403 to scripts and its archived pages are announcements rather than text — so the phrasing, including the comma, is unconfirmed.
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Wrongly attributed
Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.
Think good thoughts. Protect your mind. What your mind consumes shapes your thoughts. Your thoughts lead your actions. Your actions change your life for better or worse. Get rid of what drains you. Embrace what pushes you towards your dream life.
Unverified attribution
Account attribution and wording were supplied by a user. The account is identified as the reported sharer; original authorship and the direct post have not been independently verified. The publication date is unknown.
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.