Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of Education

QUOTATIONS BY TOPIC

BALANCE

For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for everyone but for him who knows; so, too, anyone can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy; that is why goodness is both rare and laudable and noble. ~ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Intellect"

Excessive severity and excessive indulgence are equally to be avoided. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile

En las grandes capacidades siempre ai grandes distancias hasta los últimos trances: ai mucho que andar de un extreme a otro, y ellos siempre se están en el medio de su cordura. ~ Baltasar Gracián, El Arte de la Prudencia (Number 47), 1647

For extravagant young fellows, that have liveliness and spirit, come sometimes to be set right, and so make able and great men: but dejected minds, timorous and tame, and low spirits, are hardly ever to be raised, and very seldom attain to anything. To avoid the danger that is on either hand is the great art: and he that has found a way how to keep up a child's spirit, easy, active, and free; and yet, at the same time, to restrain him from many things he has a mind to, and to draw him to things that are uneasy to him; he, I say, that knows how to reconcile these seeming contradictions, has, in my opinion, got the true secret of education. ~ John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. ~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire. ~ William James, Talks to Teachers

Vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while excellence both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. ~ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The years teach what the days will never know. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Difficult though it may be, we must learn to think holistically rather than atomistically. ~ Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, pp. 191-192

Ultimately, dichotomizing pathologizes, and pathology dichotomizes. ~ Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 192

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Last updated:
September 19, 2008 4:23 PM