Education Quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer’s “treasure behind our skull” lands with the sly humility of a novelist who spent his life watching people mistake their own minds for simple machines. He doesn’t say “brain,” the cold anatomical term, but “treasure” - a word that smuggles in mystery, value, even danger. It’s a metaphysical wink from a writer steeped in folklore and faith, someone for whom the human interior is never just neurons but a crowded room of memory, appetite, guilt, imagination, and superstition.

The repetition - “great, great powers,” “very, very small part” - reads like an immigrant’s awe turned into rhetoric: emphatic, plainspoken, slightly incantatory. Singer’s intent isn’t to praise intelligence in the IQ sense; it’s to insist on untapped capacity in the moral and imaginative sense. The subtext is both hopeful and chastening. If the mind is treasure, most of us are living like paupers. Not because we lack gifts, but because we haven’t developed the tools (attention, discipline, ethical clarity) to spend them well.

Context matters: Singer wrote in the long shadow of 20th-century catastrophe, with firsthand knowledge of how “great powers” in the human head can produce both art and atrocity. That’s why the line vibrates with double meaning. He’s not offering a self-help mantra. He’s pointing at an unfinished frontier, and implying that ignorance of our own inner machinery is one of history’s most expensive mistakes.