To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
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Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 26John Buchan
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I’ve been educated in some pretty lively barrooms, like the Cedar Bar in New York. And I went to high school with Frank Stella and when he got out of college he went to New York and started painting… …I was working with sculpture in a kind of dilatory way, and he said to come up and work in his tiny loft when he wasn’t there. At the same time I sort of dabbled in a little bit of painting, and a kind of confusion.I was an eye, ear, nose, and throat person too... ...One day Frank Stella just said to me, “Look, if you paint another painting I’m going to cut off your hands.” I asked, “Can’t I become a good painter?” Frank said, “No, because you are a good sculptor now.” That’s really my formal education... ...the company of artists is the great education. We educate each other. I’ve learned from older, wiser people by the old Greek method of sitting down and drinking with them. And that’s how I received my education.
Carl Andre
The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good.
Richard Weaver
For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiancé,' why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Albert Camus
Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.
Alexander McCall Smith
Buchan, John
Buchanan, James
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