Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Education
Brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel.
Acts. XXII. 3.
Culture is “To know the best that has been said and thought in the world.”
Matthew Arnold—Literature and Dogma. Preface. (1873).
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Bacon—Essays. Of Studies.
Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character.
Hosea Ballou—MS. Sermons.
But to go to school in a summer morn,
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day—
In sighing and dismay.
Wm. Blake—The Schoolboy. St. 2.
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Attributed to Lord Brougham.
Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage,—a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier, in full military array.
Lord Brougham—Speech. Jan. 29, 1828. Phrase “Look out, gentlemen, the schoolmaster is abroad” first used by Brougham, in 1825, at London Mechanics’ Institution, referring to the secretary, John Reynolds, a schoolmaster.
Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers’ ends.
Burton—Anatomy of Melancholy. Pt. III. Sec. I. Mem. I. 1.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied, “and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
Lewis Carroll—Alice in Wonderland. Ch. X.
No con quien naces, sino con quien paces.
Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.
Cervantes—Don Quixote. II. 10.
To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
G. K. Chesterton—Heretics.
Quod enim munus reipublicæ afferre majus, meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimus juventutem?
What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?
Cicero—De Divinatione. II. 2.
How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
Cowper—Progress of Error. L. 410.
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
Diogenes. (According to Stobæus).
The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
Isaac D’Israeli—Literary Character. Ch. VI.
By education most have been misled.
Dryden—Hind and Panther. Pt. III. L. 389.
My definition of a University is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student on the other.
Tradition well established that James A. Garfield used the phrase at a New York Alumni Dinner in 1872. No such words are found, however. A letter of his, Jan., 1872, contains the same line of thought.
Impartially their talents scan,
Just education forms the man.
Gay—The Owl, Swan, Cock, Spider, Ass, and the Farmer. To a Mother. L. 9.
Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
Holmes—The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. L. 1.
The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.
Mrs. Jameson—Education. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles.
Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.
Samuel Johnson—Boswell’s Life of Johnson. (1772).
But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
Lowell—Among my Books. New England Two Centuries Ago.
Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Horace Mann—Lectures and Reports on Education. Lecture 1.
Enflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.
Milton—Tract on Education.
Der preussiche Schulmeister hat die Schlacht bei Sadowa gewonnen.
The Prussian schoolmaster won the battle of Sadowa.
Von Moltke—In the Reichstag, Feb. 16, 1874.
Tempore ruricolæ patiens fit taurus aratri.
In time the bull is brought to wear the yoke.
Ovid—Tristia. 4. 6. 1. Trans. by Thomas Watson. Hecatompathia. No. 47.
The victory of the Prussians over the Austrians was a victory of the Prussian over the Austrian schoolmaster.
Privy Councillor Peschel, in Ausland, No. 19. July 17, 1866.
Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
Wendell Phillips—Speeches. Idols.
Lambendo paulatim figurant.
Licking a cub into shape. (Free rendering.)
Pliny—Nat. Hist. VIII. 36.
So watchful Bruin forms with plastic care,
Each growing lump and brings it to a bear.
Pope—Dunciad. I. 101.
Then take him to develop, if you can
And hew the block off, and get out the man.
Pope—Dunciad. IV. 269. A notion of Aristotle’s that there was originally in every block of marble, a statue, which would appear on the removal of the superfluous parts.
’Tis education forms the common mind;
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.
Pope—Moral Essays. Ep. I. L. 149.
Twelve years ago I made a mock
Of filthy trades and traffics;
I considered what they meant by stock;
I wrote delightful sapphics;
I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
I supped with Fates and Fairies—
Twelve years ago I was a boy,
A happy boy at Drury’s.
W. M. Praed—School and Schoolfellows.
He can write and read and cast accompt.
O monstrous!
We took him setting of boys’ copies.
Here’s a villain!
Henry VI. Pt. II. Act IV. Sc. 2. L. 92.
In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke.
Much Ado About Nothing. Act I. Sc. 1. Quoted from Kyd—Spanish Tragedy. Act II. Found in Dodsley’s collection.
God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature.
Much Ado About Nothing. Act III. Sc. 3. L. 13.
Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.
Madame de Staël—Corinne. Bk. IX. Ch. I.
Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose,
To tell what every schoolboy knows.
Swift—Century Life.
Every school-boy knows it.
Jeremy Taylor—On the Real Presence. Sec. V. 1. Phrase attributed to Macaulay from his frequent use of it.
Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.
William Whitehead—The Roman Father. Prologue.
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sunning;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry vines are running.
Whittier—In School Days.
Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education.
Robert C. Winthrop—Yorktown Oration. Oct. 19, 1881.