The Gift of Fire Quotes

“Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Always let your conscience be your guide" is advice of doubtful value. Conscience must be, among other things, a list of sayings, an anthology of quotations and precepts. Where did they come from, and who first wrote them on my empty slate, and why?”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your own mind.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If such as Thomas a Kempis and Bernard of Clairvaux are generous providers of the occasion of education, rather than reciters of precepts and beliefs, it is because they are seeking to be virtuous and to compose their own lives, rather than worrying that others might be vicious, leading discordant lives. Such teachers do the best that a teacher can do. In their own deliberations, they cast enough light that I may see something by it, if I happen to be looking.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are "of our mind," we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“When I fume in the tollbooth line, I am not a good person to whom a bad thing is happening. I am a liar who is getting what he deserves.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“I have made and accepted my own version of the natural order of things, and actually supposed a universe that has, or damn well ought to have, my convenience in mind.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“When the power of saying is small, the power of thinking is small.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“I have to confess that, in the years I have spent as a schoolteacher, I have learned much more from my students than they have from me. While that will surely sound like a feigned humility, it isn't feigned, and it isn't humility either.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Only out of a great delusion would I say, We have learned how to send men to the moon. No such thing is true. We have not. Somebody has, to be sure, but not "we". We have not wiped out polio, nor have we learned the secret of atomic energy. A few of us, and a very few of us, have done all such things. Unless I remember that, I am continually subject to the delusion that tells me that I am somehow "better" and more "advanced" than my very distant ancestors who painted pictures on the walls of caves, and just because I happen to be a member of we.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“The first and most obvious understanding of education comes from the fact that anyone who can not tell Reason from rubbish is not yet in a condition to know that he can not tell Reason from rubbish, a disability, which, you would suppose, can hardly be one of those put forth as education. But it is.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“They might also ask us by what reasoning we have concluded that we can have it both ways, that in one breath we can say that those remote and lofty thinkers have not answered our questions as to the good, and, in another, we can boast that "we" have indeed become a "better" species, having virtuously given up such nasty habits as slavery and dueling and cannibalism.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is a "shouldness" in it.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Which will be detected by an intelligence test: the ability to make some rationally demonstrable conclusion as to whether suffering injustice is better than inflicting, or the ability to tell where the trains will meet? Is it possible that we might meet some person who does indeed give himself to consider whether patience is a fixed or a changeable attribute, but can not for the life of him tell you which diagram was made from which? And one more question: How did the makers of the intelligence test come to "know" what intelligence is, that they can devise ways to measure it, and then pronounce its worth in numbers?”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If it is education that is brought about in the would-be-stone-throwers, and that might be brought about in us even by just the right little thing, education must have some attributes that we don't ordinarily grant it. For one thing, it is not a "rank," like citizenship or captaincy. It is an inward event, like joy or surprise. It would seem more correct to say, education has sometimes happened to me, than, I am educated. That would also reflect the fact that education is usually temporary, and who is brought to it just now, and in this context, may fall out of it tomorrow, or forget all about it when his belly growls. Thus it can be, for instance, that a highly trained and skillful expert can also be foolish, and utterly uneducated.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention. They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces, something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably bigger and more complicated.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire