I don't mean to say I do not or have not disobeyed it, but it is always the worse for me in the end; it is like taking a short cut in the mountains; you get to your end in time, but far more tired and shaky than if you had followed the right road, which started so much to the left among the pines, and moreover, you get there very much behind your party.
"This time it tells me that I am not equal to the direct responsibility; that I can not, with my habits of mind and temper, impress a permanent enough mark upon the lads.

It is like beginning a system of education that is to take, say, thirty years, giving them a year of it, and then taking to another; you not only lose your year, but you unfit them for other systems.

That is what I should do; my methods do not prepare them for other normal education; it is only the beginning of a preparation for what I believe to be a higher and more complete education, but that wouldn't justify my keeping on.
"I do not believe that I have done any harm; in fact, my theory would forbid me to think so; but it also informs me that my _role_ is not to be that of a schoolmaster.
"I shall be a poor man, of course; poor, that is, for an independent gentleman.

I wish I were a Fellow of a College at Cambridge; I would try and be as ideal as Gray in that position.".