Quotes About Learning

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

The more we know about the past, the more we know what is not true about the present

las ciencias naturales no eran el paradigma del conocimiento.

I think an education is beneficial, but whether it takes an education to be successful in the arts is a whole other question.

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

Every Mistake Teach Us a Lesson

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, "So? Did you learn anything today?" But not my mother. "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?" That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.

A witch is someone who has dedicated her life to learning about the connections between things. She studies the different cycles and her place in them. She learns how to use the energy in herself and in the world to make changes. And most of all, she tries to make the world a better place for herself and other people.

Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

If I have come further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Nowadays, people are shallow and their resolution is not in earnest. They dislike the strenuous and love the easy from the time they are young. When they see something vaguely clever, they want to learn it right away; but if taught in the manner of the old ways, they think it not worth learning. Nowadays, the way is revealed by the instructor, the deepest principles are taught even to beginners, the end result is set right out in front, and the student is led along by the hand.

The demon said, "The Way cannot be seen or heard. What can be seen or heard are just the traces of the Way. But you will be enlightened about what has no traces by the traces themselves. This is called 'receiving it on your own.' If Learning is not receiving it on your own, it will have no function. Though swordsmanship is just a trivial art, it uses the essence of mind and, extended to its most fundamental principle, merges with the Way.

These things are endless. When you try fixing your mind on the places you contact with your eyes and ears, you'll find that everything between Heaven and Earth can become the seed of some resourcefulness. There is nothing under Heaven that cannot be said to be your teacher. Everything is important to you, so search it out. When there is absolutely nothing important enough for you to search out, there will be nothing left for you to receive from mankind.

Thus, there is nothing that is hidden. And it is just like this in Learning. For the disciples of Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Ch'ao Fu, and Hsu Yu,53 they were one in seeing the essence of mind in selflessness and absence of desire. Thus, they had not a hair's breadth of selfish thought in their heads to encumber them. It was simply that the landscape they saw was different, and so in their separation, their schools were different.

An earthworm close by sighed and said, "Well now, men are clear enough about what they've understood, but can't infer one thing from another. The men who lecture on the Four Books and the Six Classics,1 with their magnificent and noble principles, would none of them understand commentary on their own minds. Thus, once separated from their books, they are unable to understand the mind at all.

From listening comes wisdom, and from speaking repentance.

Proverbs bear age and he who should do well may view himself in them as in a looking-glass.

He who knows little quickly tells it.

He who knows nothing doubts nothing.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked. "At least I will learn this melody before I die.