226
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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Attribution
227
In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.
228
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.
229
Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point-blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining
230
If to-day thou art not ready, how shalt thou be ready to-morrow?
231
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!
232
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
233
Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.
234
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.
235
While a slave remains in his fetters, the land must have no rest.
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
236
Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute.
237
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emersonmisattributed·Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers, by Muriel Strode, in The Open Court, Volume XVII, Number 567·August 1903
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.
238
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.
239
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.
Socratesmisattributed·Of Hearing, in Plutarch's Morals, Volume 1 (corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin)·1878
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.