Education Quote by John Morley

Morley’s sentence treats “they” (almost certainly books, ideas, or the moral arts of culture) not as decoration but as survival equipment. Calling them “guiding oracles” is a sly, secular theft: the authority once granted to gods is reassigned to something man-made, discovered “for himself.” It’s a statesman’s way of flattering modernity while warning it. If we’re done with revelation, we still need guidance; we just have to manufacture it, test it, revise it.

The phrase “that great business of ours” compresses an entire civic philosophy into a shrug. Life is framed as work, a shared enterprise with standards and apprenticeships, not a private self-care project. Morley’s cadence then turns brutally practical: “to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.” That escalation reads like a curriculum for adulthood and a primer for governance. “To be” suggests character and self-command; “to do” suggests action, duty, reform; “to do without” is the hardest clause, a nod to scarcity, restraint, and the discipline of not getting your way; “to depart” is death, handled with Victorian tact but no real euphemism. The list makes mortality part of citizenship rather than an awkward footnote.

Context matters: Morley lived in the age of liberal reform, empire, and industrial dislocation, when old certainties were weakening but bureaucratic life was tightening. The subtext is that a society can’t run on progress alone. It needs an interior literature of limits - not to anesthetize hardship, but to teach people how to meet it without becoming cruel or childish.