1
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.