Teaching

"Yes, my dear friend," he said (and I shall omit the episodes of impasse that detracted from his polemic), "if you are for health---then that truly has little to do with intellect and art, even stands at some odds with them, and in any case the one has never been very concerned about the other. To play the good family doctor who warns about reading something prematurely, simply because it would be premature for him his whole life long---I'm not the man for that. And I find nothing more tactless and brutal than constantly trying to nail talented youth down to its 'immaturity,' with every other sentence a 'that's nothing for you yet.' Let him be the judge of that! Let him keep an eye out for how he manages. It's only too understandable that time drags for him until he can hatch from the shell of this old-fashioned German backwater."


A teacher is the personification of the apprentice's own conscience, confirming his doubts, explaining his discontents, prodding his own urge to improve.


- Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus