1
The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.
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2
You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.
3
There is an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to develop a student's mind.
4
No one gets much out of life who does not make his education a real, vital part of himself.
5
What you imagine, you will think, and what you think, you will become.
6
I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
Wrongly attributed
Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.
7
The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make.
8
Man can only receive what he sees himself receiving.
9
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
10
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
11
Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.
12
Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.
13
Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.
14
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!
Wrongly attributed
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.
15
I try to scare myself at least once a day.
16
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
17
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.
18
Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance.
19
Necessity is the mother of invention.