Julie Cheek > Julie's Quotes

“Thinking is like exercise, it requires consistency and rigor. Like barbells in a weightlifting room, the classics force us to either put them down or exert our minds. They require us to think.”
― Oliver Van DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century

“Since the purpose of reading, of education, is to become good, our most important task is to choose the right books. Our personal set of stories, our canon, shapes our lives. I believe it is a law of the universe that we will not rise above our canon. Our canon is part of us, deeply, subconsciously. And the characters and teachings in our canon shape our characters--good, evil, mediocre, or great.”
― Oliver DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century

“The myth is that it is possible for one human being to educate another”
― Oliver DeMille

“The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. ‘They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring,”
― Oliver DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century

“[Homeschooling]...recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.”
― Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“Teaching, therefore, asks first of all the creation of a space where students and teachers can enter into a fearless communication with each other and allow their respective life experiences to be their primary and most valuable source of growth and maturation. It asks for a mutual trust in which those who teach and those who want to learn can become present to each other, not as opponents, but as those who share in the same struggle and search for the same truth.”
― Henri Nouwen

“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”
― Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

“Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.”
― Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

“There are those who wish to read everything. Do not try to do this. Let it
> alone. The number of books is infinite, and you cannot follow
> infinity...For where there is no end, there can be no rest; where there is
> no rest, there can be no peace; and where there is no peace, God cannot
> dwell.”
― Hugh of St. Victor

“Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation