Quotes About Learning

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

The mind is a basket . . . if you put nothing in, you get nothing out.

What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first

The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.

Nobody should ever try to second-guess history; the facts are fantastic enough.

Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.

No one can "get" an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process. If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.

I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn.

The more one learns the more he understands his ignorance. I am simply an ignorant man, trying to lessen his ignorance.

I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning.

This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.

Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing and no drugs are needed.

Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they've missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I've ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one.

he who ceases to learn is already a half-dead man.

It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.

Actually, he said one morning, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you an education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child's coloring book. You must fill in all the colors yourself.