Quotes About Learning

But in Athens, in Platonic Athens, at least, the idea that each man must himself be a research worker in the truth if he were ever to attain to any share in it, seemed rather to attract than to repel.

I have been taught by misery, he said. He had learned that no crime was beyond atonement, that even he, defiled by a mother's murder, could be made clean again.

The troll language was very difficult to learn, bearing no relation to Njorden or any other language I had heard... As I learned more and more, I was reminded of times I had to pick out the stitches of a particularly complicated piece of sewing. One word might unravel a whole set of words, and then I'd come to a knot and have to begin all over again.

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.

He knew enough of his subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it....

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

the endless labour of rolling human stupidity up the steep hill of understanding.

During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one's feet.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

In history, a great volume is unravelled for our instruction, drawing materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that are valuable.

his reverie merged discouragingly into the austere reality of the classroom.

They never open their mouths," he complained of two House colleagues, "without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." Asked

Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.

As you can hear, it's difficult to learn another language after forty.

Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.

That's one of the problems—and joys—of old age: every time you read a book it's the first.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.