Quotes About Learning

Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

When learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foesFirst rear'd the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;Each change of many-color'd life he drew,Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new:Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.

When I first collected these authorities, I was desirous that every quotation should be useful to some other end than the illustration of a word; I therefore extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,And pause a while from learning to be wise.There mark what ills the scholar's life assail—Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he cannot apply will make no man wise.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.

You must have taken great pains, sir; you could not naturally been so very stupid.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.

If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;

As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.

The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.

Samuel Noah Kramer