Quotes About Education

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

When a king asked Euclid, the mathematician, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner? he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by lectures.—You might teach making of shoes by lectures!

Grammar, which is the art of using words properly, comprises four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sire, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn't 'em both.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

The flesh of animals who feed excursively, is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?

All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it.

Indeed Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr. Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, 'My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.' He told Mr. Langton, that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, 'And this I do to save you from the gallows.

Nothing has so much exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves.

APOCOPE  (APO'COPE)   n.s.[  figure in grammar,when the last letter or syllable of a word is taken away; as, ingeni for ingenii.

If the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigour and industry, and are in a worse state than the former.Lockeon Education,¶ 46.

You have folly deeprooted within you. That weed is a native of the soil. A very little watering will make it sprout, and choak the noble flowers that education has planted.

Travelling! Young men travelling! I cannot, my dear, but think it a very nonsensical thing! What can they see, but the ruins of the gay, once busy world, of which they have read? To see a parcel of giddy boys, under the direction of tutors, or governors, hunting after — What? — Nothing; or at best but ruins of ruins; for the imagination, aided by reflection, must be lest, after all, to make out the greater glories which the grave-digger Time has buried too deep for discovery.

And yet all I have said is but  from common reading. And, let me ask, why, because we know but little, we are to be supposed to know nothing?

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable,is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained form actual life is of the nature of wisdom.

The New Héloise in the field of sentiment and of the relation of the sexes, The Social Contract In political theory, and Émile in matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's generation it would be hard to estimate