Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Education

"To be self-sustaining, a people has to attend to its economy. To be self-renewing it has to attend to the education of its youth." -

"Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money - in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one." - Bel Kaufman

"Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education... The human mind is our fundamental resource." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"We cannot consider the people truly educated if they think of education only as the gathering of facts, data and information. The intelligent person is one who has learned how to choose wisely and therefore has a sense of values, a purpose in life and a sense of direction." - J. Martin Klotsche

"I consider that it is on instruction and education that the future security and direction of the destiny of every nation chiefly and fundamentally rests." - Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva

"Much of what has been achieved by the art of education in the nineteenth century has been frustrated by the art of propaganda in the twentieth." -

"We firmly believe that therapy is education rather than healing; that it is growth rather than treatment." - Arnold Allan Lazarus and Alan Fay

"Education begins the gentleman, but reading good company, and education must finish him." - John Locke

"He that has found a way to keep a child's spirit easy, active, and free, and yet at the same time to restrain him from many things that are uneasy to him has, in my opinion, got the true secret of education." - John Locke

"Our chief aim of any true system of education must be to impart to the individual the courage to play the game against any and all odds, the nerve to walk into the ambushes of existence, the hardiness to face the most despicable truth about himself and not let it daunt him permanently; it must armour him with an ultimate carelessness." -

"If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual." - Henry T. Maschal

"The aim of education should be to convert the mind into a living fountain, and not a reservoir. That which is filled by merely pumping in, will be emptied by pumping out." - John M. Mason, fully John Mitchell Mason

"Education is a persistent dream often interrupted by the nightmare of a sobering actuality. We should not be afraid to dream, for today's dream of a better world may be tomorrow's reality." - Frederick Mayer

"Real education belongs to the future; most of our education is a form of tribal conditioning, a pilgrimage in routine and premature adjustment. When education stirs our innermost feelings and loyalties, when it awakens us from the slumber of lethargy, when it brings individuals together through understanding and compassion, it becomes our foremost hope for lasting greatness." - Frederick Mayer

"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates - people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call “life.”" - Thomas Merton

"Education is no longer thought of as a preparation for adult life, but as a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death." - Stephen Mitchell

"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." - Wilson Mizner

"Just as education without humanity is the most dangerous thing in the world, so education in love, human understanding and cooperation is the greatest hope of the world." - Joy Elmer Morgan

"It is a woeful mistake to suppose that the educated are kinder or more tolerant: education creates vested interests, and renders the beneficiaries acutely jealous and very vocal." - Lewis Namier, fully Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, aka Ludwik Niemirowski, born Ludvik Bernstein

"Education should be a conscious, methodical application of the best means in the wisdom of the ages to the end that youth may know how to live completely." - Austin O'Malley

"That’s what education means - to be able to do what you’ve never done before." - George Herbert Palmer

"Education consists of being afraid at the right time." - Angelo Patri

"Education: a debt due from the present to the future generations." - George Peabody

"Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority." - Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley

"Although virtue receives some of its excellencies from nature, yet it is perfected by education." -

"Begin the education of the heart, not with the cultivation of noble propensities, but with the cutting away of those that are evil. When once the noxious herbs are withered and rooted out, then the more noble plants, strong in themselves, will shoot upwards. The virtuous heart, like the body, become strong and healthy more by labor than nourishment." -

"Instruction ends in the classroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated." -

"Two kinds of people: ... those who think and those who don't; the difference comes almost entirely from education." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Education, like neurosis, begins at home." - Milton R. Sapirstein

"We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart." -

"It is one proof of a good education, and of true refinement of feeling, to respect antiquity." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." -

"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"The real object of education is to give children resources that will endure as long as life endures; habits that time will ameliorate, not destroy; occupation that will render sickness tolerable, solitude pleasant, age venerable, life more dignified and useful, and death less terrible." - Sydney Smith

"The education of life perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous." -

"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and tat the same time cuts the sinews at the wrist." -

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better." - Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy

"The object of education is to give man the unity of truth... I believe in a spiritual world - not as anything separate from this world - but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." -

"Travel is a ceaseless fount of surface education, but its wisdom will be simply superficial, if thou add not thoughts to things." -

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -

"Knowledge does not comprise all which is contained in the large term of education. The feelings are to be disciplined, the passions are to be restrained; true and worthy motives are to be inspired; a profound religious feeling is to be instilled, and pure morality inculcated under all circumstances. All this is comprised in education." - Daniel Webster

"Editing is the most companionable form of education." - Edward Weeks

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"A mother once asked a clergyman when she should begin the education of her child which she told him was then four years old. “madam,” was the reply, “you have lose three years already. From the very first smile that gleams over the infant’s cheek, your opportunity begins." - Richard Whately

"No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get alone without education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get alone without the use of his intelligence." - Alfred E. Wiggam

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." -

"Education is the apprenticeship of life." - Robert Aris Willmott