Quotes About Learning

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing—and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It's more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude.

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and the earnest will find it.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." Faith

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Eric Hoffer, the street philosopher, put it this way: "In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.

The wounds to our ego are our teachers and must be welcomed. They must be paid attention to, not litigated.

We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe.

he had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any at all.

Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?