Great Throughts Treasury

"Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"There is but one thing needful—to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Wise men learn by other men's mistakes, fools by their own." - Henry George Bohn

"Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that." - Harold Kushner, fully Harold Samuel Kushner

"The first lesson to learn is to resign oneself to the little difficulties in life, not to hit out at everything one comes up against. If one were able to manage this one would not need to cultivate great power; even one's presence would be healing" - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

"Grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss." - Nicholas Black Elk, formally Heȟáka Sápa

"To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits. " - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"For after all, man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. " - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams

"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? " - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"When will the churches learn that intolerance, personal or ecclesiastical, is an evidence of weakness: The confident can afford to be calm and kindly; only the fearful must defame and exclude." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season." - Heraclitus or Heraclitus of Ephesus NULL

"To find God is but the beginning of wisdom, because then for all our days we have to learn his purpose with us and to live our lives with him. " - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance. He does not learn to differentiate between troubles and difficulties, usually, until some real trouble bowls him over. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference." - Herbert Newton Casson

"It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is. " - Herman Hesse

"The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life... Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality." - Hermes Trismegistus

"He who refuses to learn deserves extinction." - Hillel NULL

"A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses." - Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL

"Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction." - Hyman George Rickover

"It is necessary for us to learn from others' mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself." - Hyman George Rickover

"You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose." - Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī

"Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. " - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov

"It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds." - Ivan Illich

"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school." - Ivan Illich

"What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"To bring about a total change of man, man has to become aware of himself - that is, he has to learn about himself anew. Man, according to the recent discoveries of anthropology, has lived for two million years; and man has not found a way out of his misery. He has escaped from it, he has run away through some fanciful illusion. But he has not found it, has not built a society that is totally free; he has not built a society which is not a society of conformity." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Death is a door, it is not a stopping. Awareness moves but your body remains at the door -- just as you have come here and left your shoes at the door. The body is left outside the temple, and your awareness enters the temple. It is the most subtle phenomenon, life is nothing before it. Basically life is just a preparation for dying, and only those are wise who learn in their life how to die. If you don't know how to die you have missed the whole meaning of life: it is a preparation, it is a training, it is a discipline. Life is not the end, it is just a discipline to learn the art of dying. But you are afraid, you are scared, at the very word death you start trembling. That means you have not yet known life, because life never dies. Life cannot die." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"You will have to learn ways of relaxing in the present. Enlightenment is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method -- you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment... the sudden realization that all is as it should be. That's what enlightenment is!" - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"He must be a thorough fool who can learn nothing from his own folly." - J. C. Hare (1795-1855) and A. W. Hare

"We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage." - Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.

"A man has to learn that he cannot command things, but that he can command himself; that he cannot coerce the wills of others, but that he can mold and master his own will: and things serve him who serves Truth; people seek guidance of him who is master of himself. " - James Allen

"Children learn to care by experiencing good care. They come to know the blessings of gentleness, or sympathy, of patience and kindness, of support and backing first through the way in which they themselves are treated. " - James L. Hymes, Jr.

"Added man-made failure really hurts young children [under six]. No one has to contrive lessons for these youngsters so that they will learn how to lose—they are losers too much of the time. No one has to put them in their place—they know all too well in their hearts the little place they are in. No one has to cut them down to size—their size is painfully small. At this stage in their development we are wise to stay away from competition, from games and races and contests with winners and losers. It matters too much to each child to come in first—they cannot stand the risk of competition. " - James L. Hymes, Jr.

"We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith." - Jane Addams

"We learn the rope of life by untying its knots. " - Jean Toomer

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness." -

"Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance. " - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

"We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

"To know how to choose a path with heart is to learn how to follow intuitive feeling. Logic can tell you superficially where a path might lead to, but it cannot judge whether your heart will be in it." - Jean Shinoda Bolen

"The wisest man may always learn something from the humblest peasant." - Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Man can only learn to rise from the consideration of that which he cannot surmount. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

"Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill." - Jeane Kirkpatrick

"We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.

"Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.