Quotes About Education

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?

No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

Is it not the true scholar the only true master?

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

De multe ori, viitorul unui om a depins de lectura unei c?r?i.

Pomp and pretense have nothing to do with thought and knowledge. Gowns and diplomas cannot impart the least syllable of wisdom. Forget this, and our American universities will be impoverished even as they amass riches from their students and benefactors.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused. I notice too, that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.

Good books replace the best universities.

All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.

I would not be hurried … to underrate the Book. … As the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge… I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet.

When nature awakens our wonder and curiosity, we become scholars. This is the beginning of education. Through our senses, nature impresses herself on our minds. Her splendors shine forth everywhere we turn—from the largest masses to the tiniest particles. Then our mind begins to classify all that we survey, turning nature into organized knowledge.

Dónde está el maestro que enseñó a Shakespeare? ¿Dónde el que enseñó a Franklin, a Washington, a Bacon, a Newton? Todo gran hombre es único.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight.

The scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge

I am embarrassed to admit what drew me to psychology. I didn't want to go to medical school. I was getting good grades in psychology and I was charismatic and people in the psychology department liked me. It was as low a level as that.

I was just getting more and more knowledgeable. And I was getting very good at bouncing three knowledge balls at once. I could sit in a doctoral exam, ask very sophisticated questions and look terribly wise. It was a hustle.

Tuition in the 1920s was $17 a semester;

Most of us find it very difficult to want "Heaven" at all—except in so far as "Heaven" means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. C. S. Lewis

Learning requires curiosity, exploration, evaluation, and dialogue. To be granted the product of knowledge without this process would violate what it means to be a creature.