This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
Pierre Abelard, aka Abailard or Abaelard or Habalaarz
Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.
Books | Learning | Love | Passion | Speech | Study | Happiness |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Avtalion said: “Sages, be careful with your words lest you incur the penalty of exile and are called to a place where the waters of learning are impure and the disciples that come after you drink of them and die; and the Heavenly Name is consequently profaned.”
Because a free man ought not to learn anything under duress. Compulsory physical exercise does no harm to the body, but compulsory learning never sticks to the mind. Then don't use compulsion… but let your children's lessons take the form of play. You will learn more about their natural abilities that way.
We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
Learning |
In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. There are some authors of so-called objective, scientific publications in the field of psychology who remind me of the officer in Kafka's Penal Colony in their zeal and their consistent self-destructiveness. In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka's convicted prisoner, on the other hand, we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required.
Adolescence | Better | Childhood | Commitment | Consequences | Disguise | Energy | Feelings | Force | Knowledge | Learning | Machines | Means | Order | People | Power | Psychology | Regard | Sacrifice | Study | Time | Understanding | Wonder | Zeal |
Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.
Learning |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.
THE lessons of fear which the child receives from its parents are intensified by the methods employed at the school in which he receives his education and life-training. We glory in the fact that we have made great strides in the science of education, that we are more practical in the choice of subjects for study, that we have a deeper insight into the soul of the child. And yet, in our method of imparting knowledge and in the relations between teacher and pupil, we can boast of but little progress. We still look upon the child as a more or less unwilling receptacle that must be stuffed with learning. The teacher is still a being to be feared, the school room still a prison house, and learning a punishment. Our system of education is still based on reward and punishment. A high mark is still the encouragement for zeal in study, while the backward student is haunted by the prospect of a low grade. The child, under present methods, prepares his lessons either in order to gain the reward of a high mark, or for fear of the contempt and humiliation that accompanies a low grade. In other words, he works not because of the intrinsic interest of his work but in the hope of reward or in the fear of punishment. The first motive breeds the harmful spirit of competition in the young mind.
Choice | Competition | Contempt | Education | Fear | Glory | Hope | Insight | Knowledge | Learning | Little | Method | Order | Parents | Present | Prison | Reward | Science | Soul | Spirit | System | Work | Zeal | Child | Teacher |
Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
There is first the problem of acquiring content, which is learning. There is another problem of acquiring learning skills, which is not merely learning, but learning to learn, not velocity, but acceleration. Learning to learn is one of the great inventions of living things. It is tremendously important. It makes evolution, biological as well as social, go faster. And it involves the development of the individual.
The only thing that gets in the way of my learning is my education.
Learning |
Toastmasters is learning through doing and improving through criticism.
Learning |
He who has more learning than good deeds is like a tree with many branches but weak roots; the first great storm will throw it to the ground. He whose good works are greater than his knowledge is like a tree with fewer branches but with strong and spreading roots, a tree which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot.
Deeds | Good | Heaven | Knowledge | Learning | Will | Deeds |
When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.
Books | Events | Learning | Listening | Meaning | Reading | Time |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.
Learning |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.
Awareness | Control | Future | Learning | Survival | Awareness |