Showing posts with label University of London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of London. Show all posts

Wednesday, 27 April 2016

My Reading Of Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman Of La Mancha

“Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny horse and a greyhound for racing” - Opening Passage to Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman Of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes.

Don Quixote on his horse, Rocinante, accompanied by his squire, Sancho Panza on his donkey, Dapple. Together they set out looking to right wrongs and root evil out of the world, with hilarious effects.


At long last I have finally managed to finish reading Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece, and it has enlarged my mind. I started reading this book in September 2015 and only have managed to finish it this week - 24 April/30 April. It is a thick volume book and I had other reading and writing demands competing for my attention. I had initially thought that on finishing this book, I would write a long treatise on its timeless lessons, but I am in the middle of writing a political treatise of my own so will not be able to do that after all. Instead, I found this short passage, on the Miguel de Cervantes Facebook Page, it captures the essence of Don Quixote and how he is a mirror reflection of every human being; 


Our ceaseless human quest for something larger than ourselves has never been represented with more insight and love than in this story of Don Quixote – pursuing his vision of glory in a mercantile age – and his shrewd, skeptical man servant, Sancho Panza. As they set out to right the world’s wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce, and fantasy on the way. The first and still the greatest of all European novels, Don Quixote has been as important for the modern world as the poems of Homer were for the ancients. 

Don Quixote is a great book and should be read by everyone. I have now read all the great books from antiquity with the exception of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I have deliberately set aside. I will read that book in the original when my learning of the Russian language permits it.


Don Quixote on his horse, Rocinante, accompanied by his squire, Sancho Panza on his donkey, Dapple. Together they set out looking to right wrongs and root evil out of the world, with hilarious effects.

Friday, 11 December 2015

The Plan Has Always Been To Flood Zimbabwe...

…with books (and goodwill).

My Hotel in Barcelona for the Half Marathon there. 

I will run many Half Marathons in 2016 and two of these will be in the first quarter – the first one in Barcelona and the second one in London. It is now possible for me to travel again as I have now managed to free the necessary time after 5 years of hard studying. I have also decided to make, from hereon, all my 21 Kilometre Road Races about sending books to Zimbabwe. The details of how I will accomplish this are unimportant at this stage. I will say more about that as the day draws closer. 

I like a comfortable place to, if truth be told, keep my bags in as I rarely sleep in my hotel room since there is always so much to see when I am abroad.

At this point I just want to justify why I have chosen to say in a 4 Star Hotel in Barcelona when, had I stayed at a Hostel, that would have freed about £200.00 which could go towards my sending books to Zimbabwe project. 

My reason is this; when I ran in the Ealing Half Marathon in September, I stayed at a Hostel and, I promise you this, you do NOT want to spend a single night in a Hostel. For someone like me, who is security conscious, staying in a Hostel is all the things I fear rolled into one nightmare. I stayed in a room with 14 bunk beds with total strangers, lying on my bed I could touch the ceiling, a woman was on the bed below mine, there were no windows, everyone comes and goes as they please… need I say more?

To the question why do I not stay in a Hostel and save money instead for my books to Zimbabwe project? I must answer; I know the people of Zimbabwe and they would be very upset to learn that I stayed in a hovel to be able to give them books.

Saturday, 5 September 2015

A 101 Quotes On Education


by Kudakwashe Kanhutu

"Those who receive this privilege therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he might have strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. If he takes this food and does not bring help to his brothers, he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given an education by the people of this Republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our union" - President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.


"By selecting the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated" - Thomas Jefferson.


"It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, 1762.


"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be" - Thomas Jefferson.


"Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity" - Aristotle.


"He who opens a school door, closes a prison" - Victor Hugo.







































"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows" - Sydney J. Harris.



"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet" - Aristotle.



"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance" - Will Durant.


"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time" - Chinese Proverb.


"Do you know the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and in that I am his pupil" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.



"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world" - Nelson Mandela.


"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself" - Chinese Proverb.


"Learning is never done without errors and defeat" - Vladimir Lenin.


"If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people" - Chinese Proverb. 

"No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity" - Thomas Jefferson.




"Learning never exhausts the mind" - Leonardo da Vinci.


"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education" - Martin Luther King, Jr.


"The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done" - Jean Piaget.


"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all" - Aristotle.


"What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul" - Joseph Addison.


"You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation" - Brigham Young.


"You can never be overdressed or over educated" - Oscar Wilde.


“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of man” – Horace Mann.



“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each” – Plato.


“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one” – Malcolm Forbes.


"There is no knowledge that is not power" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.


“Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way” – George Evans.


“Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained” – James A. Garfield.


"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation" - Walter Cronkite.


"Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value" – Albert Einstein.



"Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement" – W. Clement Stone.


“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not” - St Augustine of Hippo.


"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it" – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.


"The mind is everything. What you think you become" – Buddha.


"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why" – Mark Twain.


"A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue" - Patrice Lumumba.


“If we encounter a man [or woman] of rare intellect, we should ask him [or her] what books he [or she] reads” - Ralph Waldo Emerson.


"Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind" - Plato, The Republic.




"Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils — no, nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day" - Plato, The Republic.




"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now" – Chinese Proverb.



"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in" - Greek Proverb.



"It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs" - Aristotle.



“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army” - Edward Everett.





"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be" – Ralph Waldo Emerson.




"My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake" - Aristotle.



"No one can escape his destiny" - Plato.



"A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules" - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513.




"Therefore sages and intelligent princes are what they are, not because they are able to go to the bottom of all things, but because they understand what is essential in all things" - The Book of Lord Shang.




"To distinguish between the sun and moon is no test of vision, to hear the thunderclap is no indication of acute hearing" - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.




“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them” - Mark Twain.








































"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it" - John Locke.





"Happy is he who knows the causes of things" - Virgil.




"This education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined" - Alexander Pope.




"Seek knowledge even as far as China" - Hadith.

"We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth" - John Lubbock.



"He alone is great and happy who fills his own station of independence, and has neither to command nor to obey" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.



"In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself" - Adam Smith. 

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors" - Plato, The Republic.




"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned" - Mark Twain.



"If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him" - Benjamin Franklin.




"I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits" - John Locke.




"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.



"There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience" - Jean de la Bruyere.



"Is to dispute well logic's chiefest end? Affords this art no greater miracle? Then read no more, thou hast attain'd that end; A greater subject fitteth Faustus' wit" - Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus.