In Rousseau's view (1762). . . most of the problems of education are problems of motivation, as teachers try to rush things. They ...talk of geography before the child knows the way around his own backyard. They teach history before the child understand anything about adult motivation. . . . It would be far better, to let questions arise naturally. . . . When a child is self-motivated, the teacher cannot keep him from learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In civil and political affairs, American women take no interest or concern, except so far as they sympathize with their family and... personal friends; but in all cases, in which they do feel a concern, their opinions and feelings have a consideration, equal or even superior, to that of the other sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure an...d pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature's workings. Otherwise there would be no impulse to satisfy the needs which ensure the body's and the species' survival. And survival--for reasons we do not know--is inwritten, inscribed as nature's only goal. Gratification, or its anticipation, acts as a goad. Pain or the fear of pain acts as a warning. Both are essential. The difference between them, considered as opposites, is that pleasure has a constant tendency to exceed its functional purpose, to not know its place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That I am a poet in an age where the "unintellectual" (i.e., almost everybody) think of poetry as something they didn't like when ...they were at school, and the intellectual think it something the masses should be excluded from, is sad for me. This age has far too much reverence for poetry and too little respect--for by the same token it is very difficult indeed to earn a living from poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believ...e that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That was the saddest thing for Sybille: after twenty minutes you have got as far with these people as after half a year, as after ...many years, nothing more is added.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-t...oothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »