What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say ''I know'' instead of ''I am learning,'' and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Every unnatural activity of the brain is as mischievous as any unnatural activity of the body and that pressing people to learn things they do not want to know is as unwholesome and disastrous as feeding them on sawdust.

People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.