(From awakening student reader to textbook author and poet: A quest begins at the back of a grade 12 English classroom deep in the poetry of Hamlet….)
Much of what has given pleasure to me from age 16 on has been thinking and ideas. At first being impressed by the ideas embedded in popular music and artists like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. Next, encountering the world of ideas through literature from grade 12 on into university years. Then teaching literature and its ideas to high school English students for 30 years. Next, creating textbooks to facilitate the same. Finally becoming a poet and blogger of ideas. I would just add that consciousness has an intrinsic part of this process–thought and ideas leading, most of all, to consciousness expansion even up to and including today.
“Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.”
–Mortimer J. Adler
“An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.”
–Erasmus
“Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
“An idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.”
–Ayn Rand
“To think and to be fully alive are the same.”
–Hannah Arendt
“Thinking…in its higher forms is a kind of poetry.”
–Havelock Ellis
“Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.”
–Jose Ortega Y Gasset
“To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.”
–Anne Sophie Swetchine
“One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him.”
–William Ellery Channing
“The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into Freedom.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson