Most important things aren't exciting

From Jacques Barzun's Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

All new machinery is exciting when new; it soon loses its charm, for the mechanical does not stimulate thought, and as a wise man said: "Most important things aren't exciting. Most exciting things aren't important. Not every problem has a good solution."

This is education.

From Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? by Jaron Lanier.

How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education - in the broadest sense - does what genes can't do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

The passion for freedom breeds the rage for order

From Jacques Barzun's An Essay on French Verse - For Readers of English Poetry:

The passion for freedom breeds the rage for order.

I have always been struck by the affiliation of these two seemingly contradictory goals. With order we achieve some degree of efficiency, freeing us to pursue that which truly engages us. Yet that very order is a small constraint on freedom and, if permitted, becomes the dictator. As long as order is the servant for freedom, all is well; but they remain odd colleagues.

The friends who frequent it

Keeping Mr. Emerson's House by Paige Willaims in the September 15, 2010 New York Times. A couple of Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes. Referring to his home, his goal was to

crowd so many books and papers and, if possible, wise friends, into it that it shall have as much wit as it can carry.

and

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

A set of impossible demands

From A Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray, the essay Toward a Fateful Serenity:

In any age, life confronts all but the most obtuse with a set of impossible demands: it is an action to be performed without rehearsal or respite; it is a confused spectacle to be sorted out and charted; it is a mystery, not indeed to be solved, but to be restated according to some vision, however imperfect. These demands bear down with redoubled force in times of decay and deconstruction, because guiding customs and conventions are in disarray. At first, this loosening of rules looks like liberation, but it is illusory. A permissive society acts liberal or malignant erratically; seeing which, generous youth turns cynic or rebel on principle.

The thick darkness of futurity

From Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

. . . we proceed to the follies into which men have been led by their eager desire to pierce the thick darkness of futurity.

Thus were the trials of my young life made coherent

From A Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray, the essay Toward a Fateful Serenity:

With beach life and surrender to a great lassitude, calm slowly returned, helped out by reading adventure stories. But it was not Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe alone who restored the will to life; it was also Hamlet. I had taken him off the shelf in Paris, not in secret but unnoticed, and I brought him away with me. The opening scene promised a good ghost story.

As I read on, I discovered that the rotten state of Denmark was the state that had overtaken my world: hatred, suspicion (spies were seen everywhere), murderous fury, unending qui vive. It contradicted all the assurances of the catechism. But what could be reinvigorating about Hamlet? Well, to begin with, his skill in warding off menaces from all sides; he was the equal of Crusoe in survival. And especially comforting was his ability to overcome his doubts in the terrible murkiness of his situation. His death at the end was a fluke, not a failure; Fortinbras said what a good king he would have made "had he been put on."

Thus were the trials of my young life made coherent in a view of Hamlet I have never found reason to alter . . .

Libri aut liberi

From Contexts of Optimal Growth in Childhood by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Persons who identify themselves with culture rather than with nature often prefer to leave their memes to posterity, instead of their genes. The Romans expressed this choice with the saying, libri aut liberi - books or sons - assuming that the energy that goes into creating cultural products must come at the expense of biological reproduction.

This rule should be observed

Cicero, De Re Publica -

In a republic, this rule should be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.

Two petals from that wild-rose tree

Memory <
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour -
'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May -
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.