Youth and Education
He was born at Saalfeld in the Electorate of Saxony, the son of a poor clergyman. He grew up in pietistic surroundings, which powerfully influenced him his life through, though he never became a Pietist. In his seventeenth year he entered the University of Halle, where he became the disciple, afterwards the assistant, and finally the literary executor of the orthodox rationalistic professor SJ Baumgarten. He also wrote Latin poems. In 1749 he accepted the position of editor, with the title of professor, of the Coburg official Gazette. But in 1751 he was invited to Altdorf as professor of philology and history, and in 1752 he became a professor of theology in Halle.
Read more about this topic: Johann Salomo Semler
Famous quotes containing the words youth and/or education:
“A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a barroom around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremarked seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.”
—Walt Whitman (18191892)
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)