Education Quote by Wilhelm von Humboldt

Humboldt is smuggling a dangerous consolation into a moral argument: immorality is an evil, yes, but it can function like a teacher. The line works because it refuses the comforting fantasy of clean progress. People don’t become “virtuous” by absorbing maxims; they become virtuous the hard way, by testing boundaries, paying costs, and discovering what they can’t live with. That’s the educator speaking, but not in the schoolroom sense. It’s education as formation - character built through collision.

The subtext is a defense of historical and personal turbulence against tidy moralism. Humboldt, a key architect of modern ideas about Bildung (self-cultivation), distrusts virtue-by-instruction. His “middle path” isn’t moderation as bland compromise; it’s a hard-won equilibrium reached after the psyche has seen temptation up close. The rhetoric is pointedly paradoxical: he calls immorality “great an evil,” then insists we must “not forget” its “beneficial consequences.” That pivot is the sentence’s engine, forcing readers to hold two truths at once: wrongdoing damages, and wrongdoing instructs.

Context matters: Humboldt lived through the French Revolution’s promises and excesses, the Napoleonic upheavals, and the birth pangs of modern liberal states. In that world, “extremes” weren’t a metaphor; they were political reality. Read that way, the quote doubles as a warning to reformers who demand purity and to authorities who think suppression produces virtue. Wisdom, he implies, isn’t manufactured by fear or decree; it’s distilled from experience, sometimes ugly, often necessary.