Quotes About Learning

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

There's always something when you're at fault, too, and that fault you must discover and learn to recognize and take the consequences of it.

Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself; he had learnt what it felt like to wash in clean water in the sunshine until he was clean himself, and what it felt like to satisfy his hunger with food that tasted good; he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty

He slowly smiled. 'Good. We'll start with the basics.' Her mind went blank. 'Basics?' 'Of kissing. Most people aren't good at kissing right from the start.' He looked her over. 'Unless you are a natural.' She blinked stupidly. His hand reached up and touched her cheek, gently tilting her head. 'It's like connecting puzzle pieces when you kiss. Or when you do anything else of a sexual nature.' The parts of her brain not already blank blessedly went dark.

Exchange information, learn to speak sensibly about any subject, learn to express your thoughts, accept new ones, examine them, analyze. Think objectively. Think toward the future.

the most common approach to curriculum design is to address the needs of the so-called "average student." Of course this average student is a myth, a statistical artifact not corresponding to any actual individual. But because so much of the curriculum and teaching methods employed in most schools are based on the needs of this mythical average student, they are also laden with inadvertent and unnecessary barriers to learning.

The learning context exerts very strong effects on whether a particular individual characteristic becomes an impediment to learning.

Tight on goals, loose on means" is how U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has described his expectations of accountability systems, and that phrase aptly describes our aim for curriculum. When the means of learning are restrictive, the goals of learning get warped.18

when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

Normally we try to avoid what we don't like. However, in a retreat, if we stay, we begin to see how our mental reactions actually make things harder or easier. The process highlights how opinionated and self-centered we are in familiar activities and how much we like to stay in comfortable routines. We resent being corrected as we make mistakes in learning the apparently arbitrary rules, and then we see how easily our egos are affronted.

There is no real parallel to this in science, which abhors error, and which concerns matters in which naïveté cannot be distinguished from ignorance.

But one consequence of learning anything new is that one usually learns more than anticipated.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

It is not enough to read Hesse and drink clam chowder, we must have the answers.

I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge enters the mind of the child.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitation touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful? Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be, therein to be content.

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.