Quotes About Learning

No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.

Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure," but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any other than such.

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

we are what we know.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages.

The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.

Is it not the true scholar the only true master?

Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without he heroic mind.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.

I have forgotten the books I have read, and so I have the dinners I have eaten, but they both helped to make me.

De multe ori, viitorul unui om a depins de lectura unei c?r?i.

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Pomp and pretense have nothing to do with thought and knowledge. Gowns and diplomas cannot impart the least syllable of wisdom. Forget this, and our American universities will be impoverished even as they amass riches from their students and benefactors.

Is not prayer also a study of truth, — a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.

so much of nature as he is ignorant of,so much of his own mind does not yet posess

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I've eaten; even so, they have made me.

An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch.

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long the best company for each other.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

The years teach much which the days never knew!