Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Education (26 Quotes)


    Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.

    In the matter of religion, people eagerly fasten their eyes on the difference between their own creed and yours whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of humanity

    Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.


    A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy.


    I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

    The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. . . . He is the world's eye.

    What school, college, or lecture bring men depends on what men bring to carry it home in.

    The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius.... They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead man hopes genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.



    Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

    Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled.

    The things taught in colleges and school are not an education but a means to an education.

    We are students of words we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

    Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid.

    Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him

    I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

    I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college for boys, not for men and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

    No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.


    We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.



    One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

    The cardinal virtue of a teacher (is) to protect the pupil from his own influence


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