Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
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Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
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When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
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But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
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There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
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A room without books is like a body without a soul.
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'Who are you,' said the caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I—I hardly k...
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Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
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A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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My one pupil has begun his work with me, and I will give you a description how the lecture is conducted. It is the most important point, you k...
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The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
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The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.
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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
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The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.
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What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hide hole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luke Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.
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An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
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Brave men are all vertebrates they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
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Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.
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An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
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All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies probably because they are generally the same people.
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Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
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The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
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I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers
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Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
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Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
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A man once asked to shake hands with me, the greatest Englishman who ever lived. I replied, F**k off, I'm Irish.
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