Great Throughts Treasury

"Nowness closes no doors. It involves an openness which throws away fears and expectations. It opens itself to risks, to new learning, experiences and interpretations." - David A. Brandon

"Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning, but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on." - Samuel Butler

"The three foundations of learning: Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much." - Joanne Catherall

"Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men." - William Benton Clulow

"People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning." - William H. Cowley

"The only worthy end of all learning, of all science, of all life, in fact, is that human beings should love one another better. Culture merely for culture’s sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of producing at best a shriveled branch." -

"The happy gift of being agreeable seems to consist not in one, but in an assemblage of talents tending to communicate delight; and how many are there, who, by easy manners, sweetness of temper, and a variety of other undefinable qualities, possess the power of pleasing without any visible effort, without the aids of wit, wisdom, or learning, nay, as it should seem in their defiance; and this without appearing even to know that they possess it." - Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough

"The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin." - George William Curtis

"Genuine ignorance is... profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish water-proof to new ideas." - John Dewey

"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique." - John Dewey

"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." - Ted W. Engstrom

"I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children's heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the powers of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness ands refinement and by copious reading of the best authors." -

"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." - Henry Ford

"Where ignorance is bliss, a little learning is a dangerous thing." - Erle Stanley Gardner

"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?"" - Norman Geschwind

"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." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The school is a place or institution for teaching and learning. Underneath this definition in every standard dictionary is another definition: School is a large number of fish of the same kind swimming together in the same direction." - Harry Golden, born Herschel Goldhirsch

"Learning - learning - learning: that is the secret of Jewish survival." -

"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." - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

"The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"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." - David Hume

"He that recalls the attention of mankind to any part of learning which time has left behind it, may be truly said to advance the literature of his own age." -

"Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning." -

"Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"Learning is constant movement." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The most beautiful thing in the world is, precisely, the conjunction of learning and inspiration. Oh, the passion for research and the joy of discovery!" - Wanda Landowska

"The best practice entices us with its endless possibilities. It's like a journey in which as we advance one mile toward the destination, it recedes two miles toward the horizon. We're not discouraged by this, but in fact exhilarated, because a practice having infinite possibilities opens us to a life of constant learning. Every attainment serves as a platform for new and unceasing explorations in consciousness." -

"The great art of learning is to understand but little at a time." - John Locke

"Progress consists largely of learning to apply laws and truths that have always existed." - John Allan May

"The least of the work of learning is done in the classrooms." - Thomas Merton

"There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning." - Christopher Morley, fully Christopher Darlington Morley

"The word "teaching" is basically misleading. Schools cannot really teach; they can only instill a desire for learning." - Byron J. Nichols

"You are to consider that learning is of great use to society; and though it may not add to the stock, it is a necessary vehicle to transmit to others. Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainhead." - James Northcote

"Learning is the perception of differences; wisdom is the perception of similarities. The final statement of wisdom must be: Omnia sunt unum in Deo." - Walter Gorn Old or Gornold, born Walter Richard Old, pseudonym Sepharial

"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." - Joseph Parker

"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." - Theodore Parker

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; their shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drink largely sobers us again." - Alexander Pope

"The happiest hours of child-life should be in learning of the way to God." -

"The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment. And it should be spoken without adolescent resentment, rather with some sense of communion, with reverence and with joy." - Nathan Marsh Pusey

"It is in learning music that many youthful hearts learn to love." - Dominique Ricard

"Wisdom consists, not in stumbling on truth by chance but in marking, learning, and inwardly digesting it." -

"He that has acquired learning and not practiced what he has learnt, is like a man who plows but sows no seed." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"The mind is slow in unlearning what it has been long in learning." -

"When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"If the body is only the vehicle by which the soul can access the experience of physical living, then there is no real physical me. The soul (or life force) is the only real me. If you and I (the souls) want to achieve the most from this earthly lifetime, the more varied the experiences we should seek. That said, it’s too easy for you and me to fall into a comfort zone and try to avoid change. To keep this from happening, the experiences change rapidly as a result of the body moving from infancy though old age. The physical changes help to enhance our learning curve, our ability to serve, and our chance to evolve." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"We believe in a life continuum, and eternal life. Each incarnation or lifetime on earth is 'just a day in the classroom'... We believe the plane of greatest learning is the physical plane. It is up to all of us to make the most of each carnation. We believe that all there is in the universe is energy... and all energy forms, from subatomic particles to stars, are in a constant state of change and transformation... that interpreting energy frequencies on sensory bands creates the reality in which each life-form lives." - Richard and Greta Smolowe

"The perfect method of learning is analogous to infection. It enters and spreads." - Leo Stein

"I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something." - Johan August Strindberg

"Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses - to collect the diffused rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader’s imagination." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff