Quotes About Learning

Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.

They know enough who know how to learn.

All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.

A truly good book…teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read…What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Confucius said, To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

Lee los mejores libros primero; lo más seguro es que no alcances a leerlos todos.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. It is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless beside being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, he who knows nothing about a subject, and what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, — or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?

Confucious said, To know what we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

A journal is a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said.