Quotes About Learning

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

I was determined to know beans.

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.

AN ARTIST IS FIRST AN AMATEUR

As crianças que brincam a viver discernem, com mais clareza que os adultos, a verdadeira lei da vida e as suas relações, enquanto estes fracassam sem conseguir vivê-la condignamente, embora pensem que a experiência, ou seja, o fracasso, os tornou mais sábios.

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise...

Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand.

What we will call beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boated so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?