This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable, regardless of physical capacity.
We must expect to fail, but fail in a learning posture, determined not to repeat the mistakes, and to maximize the benefits from what is learned in the process.
One must remember that practically all of us have a number of significant learning disabilities. For example, I am grossly unmusical and cannot carry a tune. We happen to live in a society in which the child who has trouble learning to read is in difficulty. Yet we have all seen dyslexic children who have either superior visual-perception or visual-motor skills. My suspicion would be that in an illiterate society such a child would be in little difficulty and might in fact do better because of his superior visual-perception talents, while many of us who function here might do poorly in a society in which a quite different array of talents was needed in order to be successful. As the demands of society change will we acquire a new group of "minimally brain damaged?"
Better | Change | Children | Difficulty | Example | Learning | Little | Order | Perception | Society | Suspicion | Will | Wisdom | Society | Trouble | Child |
Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is most thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.
Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
Amongst all things, knowledge is truly the best thing: from its not being liable ever to be stolen, from its not being purchasable, and from its being imperishable...Learning is superior to beauty; learning is better than hidden treasure; learning is a companion on a journey to a strange country; learning is strength inexhaustible.
Beauty | Better | Journey | Knowledge | Learning | Strength | Wisdom |
It is certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him.
Attention | Emotions | Frailties | Honor | Learning | Man | Taste | Temper | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
There is a price tag on human liberty. That price is the willingness to assume the responsibilities of being free men. Payment of this price is a personal matter with each of us. It is not something we can get others to pay for us. To let others carry the responsibilities of freedom and the work and worry that accompany them - while we share only in the benefits - may be a very human impulse, but it is likely to be fatal.
Freedom | Impulse | Liberty | Men | Price | Wisdom | Work | Worry |
The least of the work of learning is done in the classrooms.
Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Wisdom |
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading. But a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep-freighted with truth and with beauty.
Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great thinker - it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
Beauty | Books | Learning | Reading | Thought | Truth | Wisdom | Think |