Quotes About Learning

Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.

Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.

Don't aim for perfection. Evolution, and life, only happen through mistakes.

And besides, libraries aren't just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don't like our wallets more than us.

To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.' – Socrates (after losing our quiz!!!!)

I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time - almost all of it - with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.

I read and read and read with an intensity I'd never really known before. I mean, I'd always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

To read, to seek, to know.

What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. But statistics are tricky things.

No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

Don't be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.

Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

the main lesson of history is humans don't learn from history.

Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

Maybe that is what growing up was all about. It was about changing your mind. Opening it right up. Admitting to yourself that you were wrong about stuff.