Quotes About Learning

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.

There are books . . . which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

A man is known by the books he reads.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

The student is to read history actively not passively.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.

Our best thoughts come from others.

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.

Never read a book that is not a year old.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Years teach much which the days never knew.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Children are all foreigners.

Every calamity is a spur and a valuable hint.

He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.