Ellen Terry Quotes

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

What I think tailors the creativity of most people are the rules that we learn from the age we are very small - in school, our parents.

You can't break the rules until you know how to play the game.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.

Obviously, flagrant things have to be called. There are rules. You have got to play to the rules, no question.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

Before you can be eccentric, you must know where the circle is.

The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise.

Nothing is more powerful and liberating than knowledge.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

Freedom comes when you learn to let go, creation comes when you learn to say 'no'

Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.

Knowledge must become capability.

Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.

A stallion must first be broken before it can reach its potential.

Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

The world was hers for the reading.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.

Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.

It is a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old.

Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional. And measuring originality by deviation from the mass breeds eccentricity in them.

The world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty.

It is knowledge that ultimately gives salvation.

People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.