This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The brevity of our life, the dullness of our senses, the torpor of our indifference, the futility of our occupation, suffer us to know but little: and that little is soon shaken and then torn from the mind by the traitor to learning, that hostile and faithless stepmother to memory, oblivion." - John of Salisbury NULL
"One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"The meaning of life is felt through relationship... Relationship with others and with one’s own self... Parenting, teaching, serving, creating. Learning from nature, the sages, our peers, from our emerging selves in a state of becoming." - Jonas Salk
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"A child’s direct sensory-motor exploration is required to build the neural constructions of cognition and learning." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Our children’s growth: joyful learning or cultural conditioning? A child’s socialization, which can be characterized as learning in its most complete form, encouraging reflective thought, is instinctual and arises spontaneously on its own. Culture is something quite the opposite: an intellectual, arbitrary conditioning and enhancement of automatic reflexes that must be both induced and enforced." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"We have ignored for half a century or more the studies that show some 95 percent of all a child’s learning or “structures of knowledge” form automatically in direct response to interactions with the environment, while only 5 percent form as a result of our verbal teaching or intellectual instruction." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Something has clearly gone awry when students at prestigious institutions of higher learning cannot bring themselves to denounce Auschwitz and Treblinka. Too many Americans now shrink from appearing "judgmental" or "moralistic" - the very words themselves are now used only as pejoratives. The prevailing attitude is: "Who's to say what's right or wrong?"" - Joseph Jacobs
"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet." - Joseph Joubert
"Wisdom has never made a bigot, but learning has." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Learning is the only wealth tyrants cannot despoil. Only death can dim the lamp of knowledge that is within you. The true wealth of a nation lies not in its gold or silver but in its learning, wisdom, and in the uprightness of its sons." - Kahlil Gibran
"The end of learning is the formation of character." - Kaibara Ekken, or Ekiken, also known as Atsunobu NULL
"(It was) an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn, that was revealed to me by my (Boston Latin School) masters as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else." - Leonard Bernstein
"Great talents, such as honor, virtue, learning, and parts, are above the generality of the world, who neither possess them themselves, nor judge of them rightly in others; but all people are judges of the lesser talents, such as civility, affability, and an obliging, agreeable address and manner, because they feel the good effects of them, as making society easy and pleasing." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"One should always think of what one is about; when one is learning, one should not think of play; and when one is at play, one should not think of one's learning." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of meaningful old age." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"The advancement of learning is the highest commandment." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Salvation is the only real success... God’s holiness is expressed in His love. Therefore love is wholeness, and to love is to fulfill - to fill full - God’s law, and be right all round. Learn then to love God and your brother and all things great and small. Life is our “chance of learning love.”" - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"As a field, however fertile, cannot be fruitful without civilization, neither can a mind without learning." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Personal health is preserved by learning about one’s own constitution, by finding out what is good or bad for oneself, by continual self-control in eating habits and comforts (but just to the extent needed for self-preservation), by forgoing sensual pleasures, and lastly, by the professional skill of those to whose science these matters belong." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned- not to see what is not." - Maria Mitchell
"As the greatest single social influence during the formative years, schools have been the instruments of our greatest denial, unconsciousness, conformity, and broken connections. Just as allopathic medicine treats symptoms without concern for the whole system, schools break knowledge and experience into “subjects,” relentlessly turning wholes into parts, flowers into petals, history into events, without ever restoring continuity... Worse yet, not only the mind is broken, but too often, so is the spirit. Allopathic teaching produces the equivalent of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused” illness - teacher-caused learning disabilities. We might call these pedogenic illnesses. The child who may have come to school intact, with the budding courage to risk and explore, finds stress enough to permanently diminish that adventure." - Marilyn Ferguson
"Making mental connections is our most critical learning tool - the essence of human intelligence: to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationship, context." - Marilyn Ferguson
"Increasing your gratitude about the good things in your past intensifies positive memories, and learning how to forgive past wrongs defuses the bitterness that makes satisfaction impossible." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"Teaching is more difficult that learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, let nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information." - Martin Heidegger
"The great end of learning is nothing else but to seek for the lost mind." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"The greatest threats to human survival will not be natural ones, but originate from inside ourselves.. For our ancestors, understanding themselves better was a pleasant luxury. But nowadays learning to control the mind may have become a greater priority for survival than seeking any further advantages the hard sciences could bring." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"The poet and the artist create by nature, not because of what they acquired by learning." - Moses ibn Ezra, fully Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as ha-Sallah "Writer of penitential prayers"
"Love is a very complex emotion, requiring a richness of personality and a great variety of talents.. It develops also into the abstract feeling for things or ideas, for beauty and learning, and, finally, into a feeling for the Supreme Being." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Learning, the destroyer of arrogance, begets arrogance in fools; even as light, that illumines the eye, makes owls blind... Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes." - Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL
"The True lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth." - Plato NULL
"Do not train boys to learning by force and harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." - Plato NULL
"Do not, then, train boys to learning by force and harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be the better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." - Plato NULL
"For ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune." - Plato NULL
"A man should be of good cheer about his soul… if he has earnestly pursued the pleasure of learning, and adorned his soul with the adornment of temperance, and justice, and courage, and freedom, and truth." - Plato NULL
"Nature without learning is blind, learning apart from nature is fractional, and practice in the absence of both is aimless." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others." - Polybius NULL
"Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we have come, by a divine leading [illness?] into the inner firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we esteem final." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Eyes are bold as lions, roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages; they wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinction. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any immunity; they must walk gingerly, according tot he laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"No man every prayed heartily without learning something." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The world can never be learned by learning all its details." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"At the beginning of the spiritual journey, many of us pushed away our humanity in an attempt to embrace our divinity... we've been learning to accept rather than reject our human qualities, creating a new partnership between the mundane and transcendent parts of ourselves." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert