Education

He went over to this desk on the other side of the room, and without sitting down wrote something on a piece of paper. Then he came back and sat down with the paper in his hand. "Oddly enough, this wasn't written by a practicing poet. It was written by a psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Stekel. Here's what he-Are you still with me?

-"Yes, sure I am."

-Here's what he said: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer - that is if you want to, and if you look for it, and wait for it- to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally an spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry". He stopped and took a big drink out of his highball. Then he started again.

Boy, he was really hot. I was glad I didn't try to stop him or anything.

"I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And -most important- nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger