educators-from-france

"I have therefore been assiduous in my researches for support and assistance. Beneficent characters have, on all hands, exerted themselves with ardour, that they might co-operate in promoting this labour of love. They have laid the foundation of a fabric whose structure will at once reflect honour on their own hearts and on the age which their lives adorn."

"Every dwelling must have a private outdoor space . . . to have more pleasure, more freedom"

"Living well in the city is the most important challenge of our time and our generation."

"Most of what exists has a lifespan which can be extended and prolonged."

"The whole person of Ravaisson was the manifestation of one unique thing: his intimate union of thought and heart with spiritual and eternal realities. Deep down, he did not believe in death because he was convinced that what passes away has its being only in what remains. He saw things and people not only in their ideas, like Plato, but in their source, which is infinite love, superior to the Idea and unfailing. He not only professed his doctrine with conviction, but lived it. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"An attempt has been made to prove, by means of selected passages from Pascal's Pensées, an apology for Christianity which he left in draft form, that by sacrificing reason to faith he denied the possibility of all philosophy. I propose to show, not as others seem to have done successfully, that Pascal was not a sceptic, but that in his “'Pensées”' there are, if not a system comparable in scope and detail to those of Descartes, of a Spinoza, a Malebranche or a Leibniz, at least the ideas that constitute the principles of a true philosophy. I propose to show equally that these ideas are in perfect agreement with Pascal's beliefs, and that there is no reason to be surprised by them, because there are none more suitable for harmonising, and even intimately uniting, Christianity and philosophy in their highest parts. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 131)"

"Pascal contrasts the objects of mathematics with other objects that are completely different, which he does not group under a common name, but merely enumerates and describes, although it is easy to recognise what he might have called, if he had had the language of his time, things of an aesthetic and moral nature; and at the same time he characterises with precise features the faculties of the mind to which these two kinds of objects respectively belong. No one else, in fact, had a clearer awareness of the difference between the two orders of things and faculties, whose contrast corresponds to that of matter and spirit; no one else had such a correct and vivid sense of the special nature of the two orders, and knew their consequences so well. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 144)"

"Leibniz noted that things can be compared either in terms of what one contains of the other, which is to compare them by their quantity, or in terms of their similarity to one another, which is to compare them by their qualities. To reduce a question of measurement to a question of order or arrangement is therefore to move from the point of view of quantity to that of quality, to move from a lower genus, where deduction is appropriate, to a higher genus, where only intuition has a place [...]. (La filosofia di Pascal, p. 153)"

"Above all, [Félix Ravaisson] was a writer. He expressed himself in broad, flexible, simple and wise phrases, elegant and solid with an air of abandon, and the logical relationships between ideas and the aesthetic harmony that coordinates them and the creative action that brings forth the details, conditions and elements from the whole and from the beginning. His style is the very soul grasped in his inner life and in the secret movement through which it gives itself and spreads. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, p. 116)"

"[...] the person of Ravaisson himself is like the act, the fulfilment of the thought which, in his written philosophy, aspires to realise itself. He immediately distinguished himself by a grace, a distinction, a smiling serenity that never disappeared. He attracted people with his good grace and impressed them with his fundamental affinity with the noble and the great. He spoke with absolute simplicity and probity, concerned only with thinking correctly and expressing his thoughts faithfully and naturally, without ever allowing a word of effect or rhetorical artifice to enter his mind. He spoke about everything and was interested in the small pleasures of the world as well as the great questions of philosophy and life. But in all things he saw the link between the ideal and the real. Like the ancient Greeks, he saw the divine in everything. (La filosofia di F. Ravaisson, pp. 115-116)"

"During the course of several years we journeyed, walking or by bullock cart, throughout this immense country, covering thousands of kilometres: during the torrid heat of summer, wending along the paths of the Himalaya, during the cool season, following the trails of Rajasthan or treading the paths shaded by coconut palms in Kerala; coming here to a halt at a shelter for pilgrims, there, at the ruins of a Mughal palace serving now as a stable for buffaloes. We ardently loved the Indian roads, and fondly preserve descriptions of these in small exercise books."

"One of the future revenges for the murder of Paris will be that of revealing the customary infamous betrayals of military reaction."

"He had brought a volume of Baudelaire which we read a few pages of when we had the time."

"We are Anarchists because it is absolutely impossible to obtain justice for all in any other way than by destroying institutions founded on force and privilege. We cannot believe that improvement is possible, if we still keep up the same institutions, now more rotten than in the past, or if we merely replace those whose iniquities are known by new men."

"how I loved her. How grateful I am to her for the freedom she allowed me to act as my conscience dictated, and how much I would have liked to spare her the bad days she so often had."

"The land which belongs to all can no more be divided than the light which also belongs to all."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"is it not time that our limited tongues should fall into the ocean of speech and of human thought? What will be the language of mankind delivered to the new Aurora — Anarchy!"

"How many are there of the countless millions who have entered this life, passed through its changing scenes and at last have laid down to rest, of whom it can be truly said, “Here rest they who have labored for the uplifting of the oppressed, who have devoted their energies unstintingly in the interest of the ‘common people?’” We fear there are few indeed. A life devoted to the interest of the working class; a life of self-abnegation, a life full of love, kindness, gentleness, tragedy, activity, sadness and kind-ness, are some of the characteristics which went to make up the varied life of our comrade, Louise Michel. In the elderly woman, clad in simple black garments, with gray hair curling upon rounded shoulders and kindest of blue eyes glancing from the strongly marked face, none but those who knew her personally would in the last few years have recognized Louise Michel…So it is in the baffling ocean of humanity. A strong character like Louise Michel looms up like a pillar of light or a star of hope, and the weary reformer sees it and takes fresh courage to struggle on in the surging ocean of humanity, and endeavors to calm its troubled waves and point the way to the harbor of plenty."

"That is what we want to destroy — this annihilation — this eating of man by an other man."

"La mujer," one of the articles that Luisa Capetillo published in 1912 in Cultura obrera, was later included in the anthology, Voces de liberación (Voices of Liberation), published in 1921 by Lux Editorial from Argentina. Printed for the purpose of gathering the libertarian voices of the most progressive women in the world, the book contains short essays by Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, and various Latin American women including Margarita Ortega, a Mexican revolutionary, María López from Buenos Aires, and Rosalina Gutiérrez from Montevideo. The editorial note introducing the authors states, "These voices of liberation are a call to women by their own compañeras to think more and act together with men in the struggle for human emancipation."

"For the anarchists in the United States Voltairine de Cleyre became the American version of Louise Michel, the French anarchist teacher who had engaged in terrorist activity during the Paris Commune, had endured several prison sentences, and was the recognized saint of international anarchism. Louise Michel had lived in deep privation, gave all her possessions to fellow revolutionaries, and spent a life of devoted self-sacrifice in the cause of anarchism. Her one self-indulgence was a passionate devotion to her mother. Anarchists emphasized the similarities between Michel and de Cleyre. Both were teachers; both nearly had been assassinated by former followers and had refused to prosecute their attackers; both tended toward extreme generosity toward the movement"

"The ideal alone is the truth — it is the measure of our horizon. Time was when the ideal was to live without eating an other up. Is it not so still under another form which exists in the so-called civilized countries where the exploiter eats up the exploited? Do not the people in nocks fertilize the soil by their sweat and blood?"

"The world carnage put an end to the golden era when a Bakunin and a Herzen, a Marx and a Kropotkin, a Malatesta and a Lenin, Vera Sazulich, Louise Michel, and all the others could come and go without hindrance. In those days who cared about passports or visas? Who worried about one particular spot on earth? The whole world was one's country."

"Along with her more famous sisters, the radical women born in the decade of the Paris Commune, Madeleine Pelletier belonged to the first generation of women for whom higher education was available and participation in mass political parties open. They shared not only the heritage of the Russian nihilists-Chernyshevsky's fictional Vera, Breshkovskaia, Perovskaia-they also grew up with stories of the Paris Commune and Louise Michel, whose funeral Pelletier and Alexandra Kollontai attended."

"I am told that I am an accomplice of the Commune. Certainly, yes, since the Commune wanted more than anything else the social revolution, and since the social revolution is the dearest of my desires. More than that, I have the honour of being one of the instigators of the Commune, which by the way had nothing–nothing, as is well known–to do with murders and arson. I who was present at all the sittings at the Town Hall, I declare that there was never any question of murder or arson...Do you want to know who are really guilty? It is the politicians. And perhaps later light will be brought on to all these events which today it is found quite natural to blame on all partisans of the social revolution…Since it seems that any heart which beats for freedom has the right only to a lump of lead, I too claim my share."

"In what would you that we should help those who govern—their work being only exploitation and wholesale murder—it has never been otherwise: the reason for the existence of a state is nothing but the accomplishment of some crime or other in order to assure the domination of a privileged class."

"Hébert established no complex rules and required no expensive equipment. There was no competition, no doping, no stadium and no specific field needed."

"He believed that the training should be varied and, similar to the parcours du combatant, he built a parcours Hébert, an obstacle course made of wood and rope that ensured you never stopped moving."

"Hébert started fighting against organized competitive sports, which he felt lacked any altruistic ideals."

"Seek to be strong not only physically but also morally."

"Methodical or rational education enhances accuracy, avoids guesswork, rejects everything that is unnecessary and monitors results."

"Resistance to cold is as part of physical education as the gymnastic exercises. It is why the bare torso must be the rule all the time when the atmospheric conditions are not too unfavorable."

"At the International Congress of Physical Education recently held at Paris the increase of public concern for the welfare and efficiency of the rising generation was made manifest to a striking degree. The most interesting among the various demonstrations of what has been done to further physical education in France, Sweden, Belgium, and elsewhere seems to have been that given by the pupils, apprentices, and riflemen of the French Navy. This demonstration consisted of exercises given under the supervision of Lieut. HEBERT, which were exact counterparts of the daily exercises followed in a large number of naval schools where the Hébert, or "natural," method of physical education is practiced... Their appearance produced a profound impression. Their chests were broad, their color was healthy, their muscles were hard. They marched with a well-disciplined and firm bearing. They went first erect and stiffly, then supple and relaxed, next half bending, and finally on all fours. They also climbed ropes, lifted weights proportioned to their strength, and, without pausing in their exercises, practiced different kinds of breathing as a means of rest."

"Hébert's method provided a renewed focus on functionality and an altruistic approach to training. He also stressed the necessity of being outdoors and simplified the equipment."

"Any physical education method should include two components: a learning part aimed at educating the body, improving endurance, strength and flexibility, teaching the basic techniques for elementary and practical exercises like walking, running, jumping, lifting, climbing, throwing, swimming and defending; and an application part aimed at developing to the highest degree the practical abilities, putting them to use, and providing the means to cope with many real life situations."

"There is, therefore, a general type of rational method or system of human development, based on progressive training work and the consistent practice of the natural and practical exercises. We can call it the natural method."

"Why be a champion jumper or a special team member in any sport, if you cannot climb or swim?"

"“Land of ancient India Cradle of humanity, hail Hail ! revered motherland, Whom centuries of brutal invasions Have not yet buried Under the dust of oblivion. Hail ! Fatherland of faith, Of love, of poetry and of science, May we hail a revival of thy past In our Western future !”"

""To study India," he says, "is to trace humanity to its sources." "In the same way as modern society jostles antiquity at each step," he adds, "as our poets have copied Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence; as our philosophers have drawn inspiration from Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle; as our historians take Titus Livius, Sallust, or Tacitus, as models; our orators, Demosthenes or Cicero; our physicians study Hippocrates, and our codes transcribe Justinian--so had antiquity's self also an antiquity to study, to imitate, and to copy. What more simple and more logical? Do not peoples precede and succeed each other? Does the knowledge, painfully acquired by one nation, confine itself to its own territory, and die with the generation that produced it? Can there be any absurdity in the suggestion that the India of 6,000 years ago, brilliant, civilized, overflowing with population, impressed upon Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece, and Rome, a stamp as ineffaceable, impressions as profound, as these last have impressed upon us? "It is time to disabuse ourselves of those prejudices which represent the ancients as having almost spontaneously-elaborated ideas, philosophic, religious, and moral, the most lofty--those prejudices that in their naive admiration explain all in the domain of science, arts, and letters, by the intuition of some few great men, and in the realm of religion by revelation." *"

"The Greek," says Jacolliot, "is but the Sanscrit. Pheidias and Praxiteles have studied in Asia the chefs-d'oeuvre of Daonthia, Ramana, and Aryavosta. Plato disappears before Dgeminy and Veda-Vyasa, whom he literally copies. Aristotle is thrown into the shade by the Pourva-Mimansa and the Outtara-Mimansa, in which one finds all the systems of philosophy which we are now occupied in re-editing, from the Spiritualism of Socrates and his school, the skepticism of Pyrrho, Montaigne, and Kant, down to the positivism of Littre."

"My complaint against many translators and Orientalists," says Jacolliot, "while admiring their profound knowledge is, that not having lived in India, they fail in exactness of expression and in comprehension of the symbolical sense of poetic chants, prayers, and ceremonies, and thus too often fall into material errors, whether of translation or appreciation." ** Further, this author who, from a long residence in India, and the study of its literature, is better qualified to testify than those who have never been there, tells us that "the life of several generations would scarce suffice merely to read the works that ancient India has left us on history, ethics (morale), poetry, philosophy, religion, different sciences, and medicine."

"More serious is Nietzsche’s uncritical reliance on the flawed translation of the text by Jacolliot, an amateur openly denounced by leading philologists like Friedrich Max Muller. Uncritical reading of this text led Nietzsche to quote mistranslations and later insertions in support of the claim concerning the Chandala (low caste) origins of the Semites, used to attack Christianity in TI and AC. Elst goes on to highlight what Nietzsche missed or omitted in his reading of the text, including not just the actual politics and institutions of the caste system, but also some striking affinities with his own views and teachings. Despite these philological blunders and misjudgements, however, Nietzsche seems to have landed on his feet after all; for in Elst’s view, he did succeed in grasping Manu’s view of man and society."

"— 'India is the world’s cradle : thence it is that the common mother in sending forth her children, even to the utmost west has, in unfading testimony of our origin bequeathed us the legacy of her language, her laws, her 'Morale,' her literature and her religion-Traversing Persia, Arabia, Egypt and even forcing their way to the cold and cloudy north far from the sunny soil of their birth, in vain they may forget their point of departure, their skin may remain brown or become white from contact with snows of the west, of the civilizations founded by them splendid kingdoms may fall and leave no trace behind but some few ruins of sculptured columns, new people may arise from the ashes of the first; new cities may flourish on the site of the old but time and ruin united fail to obliterate the ever legible stamp of origin. The legislator Manu; whose authenticity is incontestible, dates back more than three thousand years before Christian era; the Brahmans assign him a still more ancient epoch. What instruction for us, and what testimony almost material, in favour of the oriental chronology, which, less ridiculous than ours (based on Biblical traditions) adopts, for the formation of this world, an a speech more in harmony with science. We shall presently see Egypt, Judea, Greece, Rome, all antiquity, in fact, copies Brahminical society in its castes, its theories, its religious opinion, and adopts its Brahmins, its priests, its levites as they had already adopted the language, legislation and philosophy of the ancient Vedic Society whence their ancestors had departed through the world to dessiminate the grand ideas of primitive revelation."

"India, the birthplace of the human race and ageless mother with bountiful breasts."

"In point of authenticity the Vedas have incontestible precedence out of the most ancient records. These holy books which, according to the Brahmins, contain the revealed word of God, were honoured in India long before Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt and Europe were colonised or inhabited."

"France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus."

"England is an Empire, Germany a race; France is a person."

"The history of France begins with the French language. Language is the primary sign of nationality."

"The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk."