Quotes About Learning

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

I have learned little from the years that fly; but I have wrung the colour from the years.

(A country where) the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

Human beings are born with just two basic fears. One is the fear of loud noises. The other is the fear of falling. All other fears must be learned.

Most people are afraid of failing. I think there's nothing wrong in failing.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favour. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved die absolute rejection of authority.

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

Reading after a certain (time) diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately.

I hate books; they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Ordinary people know little of the time and effort it takes to learn to read. I have been eighty years at it, and have not reached my goal.