Beauty in the Word quotes

This was the best book I've read about education and it inspired the last article I wrote called "What is Education?" It's about the Trivium and his other book about the Quadrivium is now on my to-read list. 

Here are some of my favorite quotes: 

"The gravest threat our civilization faces is in fact not ecological but philosophical. It is the widespread belief that there is no objective truth and no 'true' way of considering the world and its history, only a plurality of subjective points of view, each point of view being of equal value and deserving equal respect." pg 7

"The liberal arts are a golden thread that comes from the Greeks, from Pythagoras and his successors both Islamic and Christian, especially St Augustine; a thread that weaves its way through the history of our civilization. These arts were intended for the cultivation of freedom and the raising of our humanity to its highest possible level." pg 9

"The basis for a good education is, on the one hand, the self-motivation of the child to pursue what engages and interests him, and on the other, the creativity, responsiveness, and love of the teacher, who sets the terms for learning and encourages the child to flourish." pg 25

"She almost goes as far as to say that the subject studied and its contents are irrelevant; the important thing, the real goal of study, is the 'development of atention.' Why? Because prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer." pg 30

"All this suggests that the earliest stage of education is not simply the learning of words, of names, of vocabulary, but the learning of how to name." pg 43

"All through life we are seeking a place where we can be at home, where we can truly belong. If we cannot remember that experience of belonging, then we are forced to remember something that defines it by contrast. Either way, it is memory that defines our journey." pg 45

"The contemporary dissolution of the family is also the dissolution of tradition, because it can only be passed on within the community whose identity it helps to define." pg 47

"The purpose of tradition is to serve the personal growth and development of man. But the purpose of the mechanical order that currently dominates education is for man to serve the growth and further evolution of the machine." pg 47

"I have tried in this chapter to loosen Grammar from the narrow confines of an association with sentence construction, to show that the birth of language is bound up with memory and poetry and the telling of stories about the world and about ourselves." pg 56

"'Trivium' is therfore the vital importance of crafts, drama and dance, poetry and storytelling, as a foundation for independent and critical thought. Through doing and making, through poesis, the house of the soul is built." pg 57

"A child's head is more like an acorn than a jam jar, says Atkins." pg 66

"Thus on a deeper level I am not just what I hapen to do, or choose to do; I am that which God gives me to do. I am my mission." pg 90

"The starting point is always reading (and playing music) to the child as soon and as much as possible." pg 121

"In this perspective, the teacher's task, on the one hand, is to testify that the ruth about oneself is not limited to a projection of one's own ideas and images, and on the other, to introduce the student ot the marvellous and ever surprising discovery of the truth that precedes him and over which has no control." pg 37