Quotes About Learning

I was an estructuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.

Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature - as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos - to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.

The main thing was to know the world, every twenty-five years or so, back for a couple hundred years, and if you had that info handy, always there under your belt, then you could figure out the gaps.

any experience is profitable if you allow it to be, all actions are profitable, no matter how badly you may suffer from them.

Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why

The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

A lack of openness can doom social learning efforts. Without openness, we tend to network with people like us — who don't challenge us and who know little more than we do. Because these people share the same biases and blind spots, interacting with them only reinforces groupthink.

Trinity College (Dublin) library

Don't be a genius, my son, it isn't good for anybody.

Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.

The art of remembering is the art of thinking and by adding, with Dr.Pick, that, when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.

I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

a man who possesses the art of correct reading will… instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing… The art of reading, as of learning, is this:… to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.*… Only this kind of reading has meaning and purpose…

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. —Santayana

What I've learned. . . . I've learned that just when I get my room the way I like it, Mom makes me clean it up.

The aim of a PhD's to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you're doing after the first couple of years.