SaturdayJan 17, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
A certain bygone philosophywhich certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real childused to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the childs nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children.
Abraham Lincoln tells somewhere that as a boy when he met an obscure or ambiguous sentence in his reading it threw him into a sort of rage. The fact is that this was simply a form of instinct for clear thinking which is found in every child and manifests
Every man whose tastes have been allowed to develop in wrong directions, or in whom the best tastes have failed of higher perfection, loses thereby from the inner joy and outer value of his whole life. Every good taste is a source and guarantee of happy healthy hours and days, and thus of the enrichment and elevation of life. A reasonable capacity to appreciate music and art quite suffices to enrich life and exercise a wholesome influence upon character. The taste for good reading is inseparable from a taste for good thinking.
The deepest-lying and most pervasive part of character is disposition: it accompanies us everywhere, and shows itself in all we do. It is the attitude of the soul toward life, the way in which we accept our situation and our daily experiences. On the inner side it gives color and tone to our own conscious life: on the outer side it pervades and modifies our conduct toward others and our reactions to events. A good disposition is indispensable to good character, though of course not all of character; without it one cannot hope for perfection; even with it one may fail through lack of higher elements. It is a sort of foundation layer.
GOOD is good and bad is bad, and nowhere is the difference between good and bad so wide and so fateful as in human character. For character makes destiny in the individual and in the race.
In one sense the whole process of development consists of the formation of habits; for knowledge itself, and the powers of thought, as well as the higher elements in the will, all depend upon the establishment of fixed ways of reacting to given stimuli. Consequently, the general laws of habituation underlie the whole of education. But the term habit is more commonly restricted to those established reactions that act with little or no participation of consciousness, or, in other words, mechanically or automatically. Such habits as these begin to form very early, and constitute a kind of supporting framework for the higher elements of character.
The secret of the whole matter is that a habit is not the mere tendency to repeat a certain act, nor is it established by the mere repetition of the act. Habit is a fixed tendency to react or respond in a certain way to a given stimulus; and the formation of habit always involves the two elements, the stimulus and the response or reaction. The indolent lad goes to school not in response to any stimulus in the school itself, but to the pressure of his father's will; when that stimulus is absent, the reaction as a matter of course does not occur.
'What sort of man or woman shall I be; what kind of life shall I propose and hew out ?' The answer one frames to this question is his personal ideal, and will exercise a potent influence upon the development of his character and the direction of his condu
Self-respect is the very cement of character, without which character will not form nor stand; a personal ideal is the only possible foundation for self-respect, without which self-respect degenerates into vanity or conceit, or is lost entirely, its place being taken by worthlessness and the consciousness of worthlessness; and that is the end of all character. It is often said that if we do not respect ourselves no one else will respect us; this is rather a dangerous way to put it; let us rather say that if we are not worthy of our own respect we cannot claim the respect of others. True self-respect is a matter of being and never of mere seeming. As Paulsen says, 'It is vanity that desires first of all to be seen and admired, and then, if possible, really to be something; whereas proper self esteem desires first of all to be something, and' then, if possible, to have its worth recognized.'
This sense of honor is the sense of right. It is the soul's instinctive love for the good, the true, the commendable, and its instinctive scorn of the base, mean, and vile. There is a confusion between that false honor which cares only what another thinks
NATIVE vigor of impulses and desires conserved by education and experience, the establishment of inner harmony and cooperation among the powers and capacities of the soul, the formation of a life purpose, and the direction of the individual life in accordance with the eternal principles of right that underlie human progress, these are the elements of both strength and righteousness in human character.
Our likes and dislikes exert a fateful influence upon both our own happiness and our value to others. The ancients recognized this fully, but modern education has long neglected it and is now slowly beginning to rub its eyes and awake to the significance
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