Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) was an American academic and educationalist. A leader in public affairs, he was the president of Harvard University for 40 years and the editor of the Harvard Classics.
Born in Boston, Eliot became a mathematician and chemist. As president of Harvard College (1869–1909,) he carried out radical reforms of its faculties and teaching methods and turned it into a full university. He had the most extended term as president in the university’s history. Under his leadership, Harvard doubled in strength, and the old undergraduate curriculum was abandoned for an optional system of studies.
Eliot also organized a graduate school of arts and sciences and established Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He published two manuals of chemistry and several books on education and was editor of the 50-volume Harvard Classics (1909–10.)
Eliot’s works include Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses 1869–97 (1898) and University Administration (1908.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles William Eliot
If I had the opportunity to say a fine word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don’t think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Youth
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Business, Doubt, Beliefs, Uncertainty
Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarding who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Boredom
In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Facts
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Book, Friendship, Books
The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
The fear of losing one’s job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Teaching
Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Selfishness, Giving, Kindness, Usefullness, Service
The best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible today.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Work
Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Education
When blocked or defeated in an enterprise I had much at heart, I always turned immediately to another field of work where progress looked possible, biding my time for a chance to resume the obstructed road.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Opportunities
No race has ever surpassed the Jewish descriptions of either the beauties or the terrors of the nature which environs man.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Jews
Let us remember that the times which future generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but those of adversity bravely borne.
—Charles William Eliot
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
James Bryant Conant American Chemist
Horace Mann American Educator
Booker T. Washington African-American Educationist
Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney American Educator
Frank Moore Colby American Writer, Editor
Anne Sullivan Macy American Educator
Arthur Sherburne Hardy American Engineer
Robert H. Shaffer American Educator
Laurence J. Peter Canadian-born American Educator
E. Merrill Root American Educator