It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.

though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.