#ect

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#education #ideas #intellectualism #life #philosophy

Respect is tendered with pleasure only where it is not exacted. ↗

— Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

#obligation #respect #education

Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge. ↗

— Isaac Watts

#journaling #knowledge #reflection #education

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#hinduism #spiritual #intellect

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#election #humour #school #education

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#equality #freedom #independence #individuality #liberty

At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black. ↗

— George Clooney

#gay-rights #historical-perspective #political #equality

It is man's social nature which distinguishes him from the brute creation. If it is his privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter-dependent. Only an arrogant man will claim to be independent of everybody else and be self-contained. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#equality

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#insightful #the-unexpected #equality

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#clichés #dignity #equality #fiction #gender