Great Throughts Treasury

"Perhaps the hardest lesson to learn is not to be attached to the results of your actions." - Joan Borysenko

"Silence is where we learn to listen, where we learn to see. Holding silence, being held by stillness, Buddhists and tribal people go alone to the wilderness “to stop and see,” to renew their thruth, to return to the knowledge of the extensiveness of self and the truth of no self." - Joan Halifax, fully Roshi Joan Jiko Halifax

"Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"And herein lies the secret of true power. Learn by constant practice, how to husband your resources, and concentrate them, at any moment, upon a given point." - James Allen

"He who would be useful, strong, and happy, must cease to be a passive receptacle for the negative, beggardly, and impure streams of thought; and as a wise householder commands his servants and invites his guests, so must he learn to command his desires, and to say, with authority, what thought he shall admit into the mansion of his soul. " - James Allen

"There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience." - John Dewey

"All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt

"We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn't trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow. " - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt

"There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life" - John Lennon

"We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race. " - John Naisbitt

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

"If we could learn to like ourselves, even a little, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck

"Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them learn rather than teaching them." - John Whitmore, fully Sir John Whitmore

"Never try to be better than someone else. Learn from others, and try to be the best you can be. Success is the by-product of that preparation." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"Let’s face it, we’re all imperfect and we’re going to fall short on occasion. But we must learn from failure and that will enable us to avoid repeating our mistakes. Through adversity, we learn, grow stronger, and become better people" - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"When we aren’t alert, we miss opportunities to improve ourselves. We should always watch for circumstances or situations that can help or harm us and be eager to learn from these encounters." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"The more spiritual a man is, the more he discontinues trying to make particular acts with his faculties, for he becomes more engrossed in one general, pure act, a calm and repose of interior quietude. #7. The soul would want to remain in that unintelligible peace as in its right place. Since people do not understand the mystery of that new experience, they imagine themselves to be idle and doing nothing... They must learn to abide in that quietude with a loving attentiveness to God. At this stage the faculties are at rest and do not work actively but passively, by receiving what God is effecting in them." - John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”

"If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection." - John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”

"How to Live a Hundred Years Happily 1. Do not be on the lookout for ill health. 2. Keep usefully at work. 3. Have a hobby. 4. Learn to be satisfied. 5. Keep on liking people. 6. Meet adversity valiantly. 7. Meet the little problems in life with decision. 8. Above all, maintain a good sense of humor, best done by saying something pleasant every time you get a chance. 9. Live and make the present hour pleasant and cheerful. Keep your mind out of the past, and keep it out of the future." - John A. Schindler

"It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play. " - Dizzy Gillespie, born John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie

"We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

""Failing forward" is the ability to get back up after you've been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction. Don't buy into the notion that mistakes can somehow be avoided. They can't be. Failure is not a one-time event; it's how you deal with life along the way. Until you breathe your last breath, you're still in the process, and there is still time to turn things around for the better. You are the only person who can label what you do a failure. Failure is subjective. Don't allow the fire of adversity to make you a skeptic. Allow it to purify you. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others. Seek advice, but make sure it's from someone who has successfully handled mistakes or adversities." - John C. Maxwell

"People change when they hurt enough that they have to, learn enough that they want to, or receive enough that they are able to. " - John C. Maxwell

"It is not that you must be free from fear. The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear. Resistance, in any form,does not end fear. 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, not how to resist it through courage and so on. " - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams

"When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them." - John Taylor Gatto

"Nothing is isolated. Each event connects with others. Things are constantly unfolding on different levels. It's for us to perceive the warp and woof of it all as best we can and learn to follow our own threads through the tapestry of life with authenticity and resolve." - Jon Kabat-Zinn

"What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other." - Jonas Salk

"Now, in a widening sphere of decisions, the costs of error are so exorbitant that we need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance. There are perils that we can be certain of avoiding only at the cost of never knowing with certainty that they were real." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell

"Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it's all over. The bitter pill of failure is often more than most people can handle. If you're willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you're willing to consider failure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you've got the potential of harnessing one of the most powerful success forces." - Joseph Sugarman

"Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in." - Joseph Wood Krutch

"What is commonly called conservation will not work in the long run because it is not really conservation at all but rather, disguised by its elaborate scheming, only a more knowledgeable variation of the old idea of a world for man's use only. That idea is unrealizable. But how can man be persuaded to cherish any other ideal unless he can learn to take some interest and some delight in the beauty and variety of the world for its own sake, unless he can see a value in a flower blooming or an animal at play, unless he can see some use in things not useful?" - Joseph Wood Krutch

"We learn from tragedy. Slowly." - Josephine Hart, Lady Saatchi

"Everybody has to learn for the first time." - Joshua Lederberg

"Not only should we be unashamed of grief, confident that its expression will not permanently hurt us, but we should also possess the wisdom to talk about our loss and through that creative conversation with friends and companions begin to reconstruct the broken fragments of our lives... should not resist the sympathy and stimulation of social interaction. We should learn not to grow impatient with the slow healing process of time . . . We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love,friendship, social challange, to the new weaving of a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life." - Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman

"A man who does not learn to live while he is getting a living is a poorer man after his wealth is won than he was before." - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

"Music is stored in our long-term memory. When we learn something through music, we tend to remember it longer and believe it more deeply." - Joyce Brothers

"I think I could learn a little patience with myself if I took a view of myself that included concepts like dormancy (instead of laziness), seed planting (instead of just scattered), gestation (instead of doing-something-right-this-second)." - Julia Cameron

"You can't win unless you learn how to lose." - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, born Ferdinand Lewis "Lew" Alcinder, Jr.

"It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically." - Karl Mannheim, alternatively Mannheim Károly

"In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished." - Karl Rahner

"When we can begin to take our failures seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves." - Katherine Mansfield, pseudonymn of Kathleen Beauchamp, Mrs. J. M. Murry

"We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there. In some this process of enlargement is arrested at an intermediate stage, and then love turns in upon itself and becomes sour. Some have never truly loved anything but themselves - perhaps because their first outreachings were received with coldness and lack of sympathy and then love quickly turns putrid, and becomes greed, and lust, and turns even to self- disgust. Some confine their love to the narrow limits of the family, and then too love decays into sentimentality, or hardens into indifference. The couple that are wrapped up in themselves soon find the parcel uncomfortably tight; the mother who pours out her love on her child till both are smothered in a cocoon of sentiment soon tastes the bitter worm of ingratitude and ruins the very object of her love. There are few more depressing spectacles than the perennial “old grad,” who has never broken the bonds of collegiate enthusiasm or developed beyond the throaty lore of Alma Matriolatry. And the present day provides us with the awful spectacle of what an ingrown love of country can do, what fanatical hatreds and cruelties it can engender, and how again it can destroy the very object of its love." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding

"Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL

"Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL

"You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest. If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL

"People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"Do not take yourself too seriously. You have to learn not to be dismayed at making mistakes. No human being can avoid failures." - Lawrence G. Lovasik