Quotes About Learning

War does one good—it teaches people geography.

In books we converse with the wise, as in action with fools. That is, if we know how to select our books. Some books are to be tasted, reads a famous passage, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ—to know what to ask is already to know half.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza; or, better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza, or better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

In books "we converse with the wise, as in action with fools." That is, if we know how to select our books. "Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested"; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.

To his alert mind and ears, every experience was education.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding"5

For as no perfect view of a country can be taken from a flat; so it is impossible to discover the remote and deep parts of any science by standing upon the level of the same science, or without ascending to a higher.

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."2 Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

One of his practical principles was to attend most to those pupils who were of middle ability; the dunces, he said, were beyond all help, and the geniuses would help themselves.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus —"Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps

a man's maturity pays the price of his youth.

In the midst of unprecedented learning popular ignorance flourished, and chose its exemplars to rule the great cities of the world.

Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years, you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.