This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life.
Difficulty | Failure | Fear | Learning | Personality | Price | Failure | Obstacle |
There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion; it is this, indeed, which gives a value to all the rest, which sets them at work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person who is possessed of them. Without it, learning is pedantry, and wit impertinence ; virtue itself looks like weakness; the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice.
Impertinence | Learning | Looks | Man | Mind | Qualities | Virtue | Virtue | Wit | Work | Value |
Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
There is no easy method of learning difficult things. The method is to close the door, give out that you are not at home, and work.
Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger
Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all.
Aggression | Behavior | Experience | Learning | Model | Rage | Sense | Society | Will | Society | Child | Victim |
Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
Julius Erving, fully Julius Winfield Erving II, aka Dr. J
I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.
Kenneth Eble, fully Kenneth Eugene Eble
Whether [teaching] contexts come from richness of experience, a restless curiosity, opportunities for leisure and study, or from an education aimed at breadth, they are necessities for affecting the learning of diverse students.
A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Children who are struggling present a range of issues from severe breakdowns in learning to the frustrations of those whose efforts in school far exceed their achievements. Some have brains that are wired to handle a lot of information at once. Others can only absorb and process a little information at a time. Still others must look at information many times before grasping it. Some kids' brains can recall information and skills rapidly, while others need more time to process and respond to a stimulus.
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Success is a vitamin that every kid must take in order to thrive during his or her school years. We, as teachers and parents, must make sure that this critical learning "supplement" is available to all students. All Kinds of Minds believes that embracing the unique set of ideas and practices that follow will increase our odds of succeeding at this essential task.
Lewis Carroll, pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Danger | Harmony | Joy | Laughter | Learning | Spirit | Danger |
I always thought it was a question of achieving some permanent state of tranquillity ... but it's not. It's more like learning to surf. The waves keep rolling in, each different from the last, and you have to ride them, instead of getting pounded to bits.
Learning | Question | Thought | Tranquility | Thought |
Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
Yet these types of responses to children with learning differences are all too common. The fact is that these kids often have good minds with real and obvious intellectual strengths. However, they suffer from what is often subtle dysfunction - patterns of brain wiring that makes certain aspects of learning exceedingly difficult. These children are highly vulnerable - and they're slipping through the cracks.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Lord Chesterfield, 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.
John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Human learning has often been an instrument, not a source, of hostility to religion.
Learning |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
Learning |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
You aren't learning anything when you're talking.
Learning |