
“Correction does much, but encouragement does more.”
Letter to A. F. Oeser (9 November 1768), Early and miscellaneous letters of J. W. Goethe, including letters to his mother. With notes and a short biography (1884)
“Correction does much, but encouragement does more.”
Marcelo H. del Pilar to Josefa Gatmaitan (13 March 1889), in Epistolario de Marcelo H. del Pilar, vol. I, p.57
Sparks
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Context: Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
“A book has but one voice, but it does not instruct everyone alike.”
“Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.”
The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century
“True instruction is this: —to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does.”
Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: True instruction is this: —to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does. And how does it come to pass? As the Disposer has disposed it. Now He has disposed that there should be summer and winter, and plenty and dearth, and vice and virtue, and all such opposites, for the harmony of the whole. (26).
“Encourage your kids' artistic side. Toughen up everything else.”
Attributed