Quotes About Learning

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.

Geniuses and prophets do not usually excel in professional learning, and their originality, if any, is often due precisely to the fact that they do not.

The student of Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. By learning Torah, man returns to his own self.

So much is learned by seeing how well or how poorly someone accomplishes a job he dislikes.

There are far more a worst crimes than burning books.... Not reading them.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. "To hell with it," he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

Every step they took, she told him something he'd never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she'd said it, as if he had known it all his life.

The boy answers, Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt. Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

While the boy is talking, an army of ants parades across the floor. The boy laughs when he sees them, and Indra's hair stands on end, and he says to the boy, Why do you laugh? The boy answers. Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt. Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

A félelem az elsÅ' tapasztalat, és ez a tapasztalat azt mondja: én.

You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.

I have been Foolish and Deluded," said he, "and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.

I am a bear of little brain.