Quotes & Sayings About Education Thoreau

It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even. — Henry David Thoreau

For a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. Such a one will always be rightly tolerant.It is suicide, and corrupts good manners, to welcome any less than this. I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. If you would not stop to look at me, but look whither I am looking, and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company. — Henry David Thoreau

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influencewhich flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there. — Henry David Thoreau

I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly. — Henry David Thoreau

When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university. — Henry David Thoreau

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. — Henry David Thoreau

The schools begin with what they call the elements, and where do they end? — Henry David Thoreau

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him. — Henry David Thoreau

We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church. — Henry David Thoreau

I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel. — Henry David Thoreau

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least. — Henry David Thoreau

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. — Henry David Thoreau

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. — Henry David Thoreau

When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes
remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education
make them hunters. — Henry David Thoreau

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. — Henry David Thoreau

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!
only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing. — Henry David Thoreau

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher. — Henry David Thoreau

We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our find schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last. — Henry David Thoreau

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. — Henry David Thoreau

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit. — Henry David Thoreau

We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. — Henry David Thoreau

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? — Henry David Thoreau

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded. — Henry David Thoreau

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook. — Henry David Thoreau

I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves — Henry David Thoreau

The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,
a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,
to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, ... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. — Henry David Thoreau

The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. — Henry David Thoreau