intellectual cultivation Quotes

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.

What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

The brain is a commodity used to fertilize ideas.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

Every wheatfield of human thought after a while becomes filled with cockle; then the husbandmen destroy the grain with the cockle and plant anew.

Some brains are barren grounds, that will not bring seed or fruit forth, unless they are well manured with the old wit which is raked from other writers and speakers.

Sloppy language and sloppy ways go together. Those who are truly educated have learned more than the sciences, the humanities, law, engineering, and the arts. They carry with them a certain polish that marks them as loving the better qualities of life, a culture that adds luster to the mundane world of which they are apart, a patina that puts a quiet glow on what otherwise might be base metal.

It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.

The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth out not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.

The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.