No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.
We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.
The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind’s dignity.