“What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.”
Source: Pieces of White Shell
Source: My Life in France
“What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.”
Source: Pieces of White Shell
Source: Natural Right and History (1953), p. 36
“The thing that's important for me is to remember what's the most important thing.”
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
Letter to Isham Reavis (5 November 1855)
1850s
Context: If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.... Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
“People are more important than things.”
The Last Lecture (2008)
Variant: The questions are always more important than the answers."
im Gespräch mit Hans Küng über den Weltethos, 2007, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S4KhE6nzzQ#t=5m8s