The quote database

Man should make an art of thinking.

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge, my spirit was roused to eternal wakefulness.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised

The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.

With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

do not hope to excite love except by love

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.