Quotes About Learning

The master's eye is the best fertilizer.

Pliny the Elder] used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it.

nihil novum nihil varium nihil quod non semel spectasse sufficiat

Nullus est liber tam malus ut non aliqua parte prosit - There is no book so bad that it is not profitable on some part.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them.

To find a fault is easy to do better may be difficult.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.

A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful.

And, to say truly, the greatest benefit that learning bringeth unto men is this: that it teacheth men that be rough and rude of nature, by compass and rule of reason, to be civil and courteous, and to like better the mean state than the higher.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. "For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

Whereas stories are fit for every place, reach to all persons, serve for all times, teach the living, revive the dead, so far excelling all other books, as it is better to see learning in Noblemen's lives, than to read it in Philosophers' writings.

Those who receive with most pains and difficulty, remember best; every new think they learn, being, as it were, burnt and branded in on their minds.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs kindling.

it is useful, or rather it is necessary, not to be indifferent about acquiring the works of earlier writers, but to make a collection of these, like a set of tools in farming. For the corresponding tool of education is the use of books, and by their means it has come to pass that we are able to study knowledge at its source.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days