Quotes About Learning

I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called the truth, whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts—no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn't work, start all over again.

Why revere the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

Jenny froze...cut by an unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy of her youth toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled her from learning from those more powerful.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. "Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids' heads.

But still, I'd be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one.

I thought I'd had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.

It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

He's not from here, that's the thing, Cub said. Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to nobody outside this county? Where's that going to leave us?

always tried to be positive with her, although I'd learned

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator Father Fernando Cardenal

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.

We can´t know what we haven´t been taught

A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.

All knowledge measured, first and last, by one's allegiance to the teacher.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

Barbara Kingsolver