Quintilian Quotes

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

The end of education is to see men made whole, both in competence and in conscience.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.

Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.

Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.

I speak four languages and read a great deal, so I do as much working out on the brain as I do on the body.

I like my mind being stimulated. I like discovering new concepts.

Education is soul crafting.

Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by actions.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

The mind of man can never be wholly barren. Through our whole lives we are subject to successive impressions; for, either new ideas are continually flowing in, or traces of the old ones are marked deeper. If, therefore, you be not acquiring good principles be assured that you are acquiring bad ones; if you be not forming virtuous habits you are, how insensibly soever to yourselves, forming vicious ones.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.

Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam.

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.