Quotes About Learning

This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative…. That is why constant learning softens your brain…. Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare's remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries.

No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views; because wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.

a hundred fools together will not make one wise man.

reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with ones own

Instead of developing the child's own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected.

For the longer to have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will is stay once you have got it.

Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius; indeed, concepts are as unfruitful for it as for art and of use only as tools.

it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it. [...]

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.

empat puluh tahun usia pertama kita dihabiskan dengan menulis ratusan bahkan ribuan halaman buku teks, yang akan dibaca kelak di sisa usia.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them l

How very learned many a man would be if he knew everything that was in his own books! The

You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much.

You should deal sternly and despotically with your memory, so that it does not unlearn obedience; if, for example, you cannot call something to mind, a line of poetry or a word perhaps, you should not go and look it up in a book, but periodically plague your memory with it for weeks on end until your memory has done its duty. For the longer you have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will it stay once you have got it.

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of its contents.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, Lighthouses as the poet said erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers,magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.

Gesunder Menschenverstand kann fast jeden Grad von Bildung ersetzen, aber kein Grad von Bildung den gesunden Menschenverstand.

You can apply yourself voluntarily to reading and learning, but you cannot really apply yourself to thinking: thinking have to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them.