This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Freedom of judgment can be attained only when we learn to estimate an individual according to his own ability and character." - Ernst P. Boas
"Truth is passion. One cannot learn it; one must possess it." - Ernst Toller
"Would you like to learn science? Begin by learning your own language." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him."" - Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
"The churches must learn humility as well as teach it." - George Bernard Shaw
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." - George Bernard Shaw
"We learn from experience that people never learn anything from experience." - George Bernard Shaw
"In doing we learn." - George Herbert
"Learn weeping, and thou shalt gain laughing." - George Herbert
"You will then see that you can think, feel, act, speak, work without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff
"Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclination we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He sails henceforth for one point of the compass." - George Santayana
"Who would learn to command well must first of all learn to obey." - Greek Proverbs
"Once you learn something, it is hard to unlearn." - Greek Proverbs
"Since trifles make the sum of human things, and half our misery from our foibles springs; since life’s best joys consist in peace and ease, and few can save or serve, but all may please; Oh! let th’ ungentle spirit learn from hence a small unkindness is a great offense, large bounties to restore we wish in vain, but all may shun the guilt of giving pain." - Hannah More
"The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all." - Harry S. Truman
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; not did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and search out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, when they to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn." - Henry S. Haskins
"The person who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn." - Henry S. Haskins
"Four things a man must learn to do if he would make his record true; to think without confusion clearly; to love his fellow-men sincerely; to act from honest motives purely; to trust in God and Heaven securely." - Henry Van Dyke
"Sometimes we may learn more from a man’s errors than from his virtues." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Thou shalt learn the wisdom early to discern true beauty in utility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow is our destined end or way; but to act, that each to-morrow find us farther than today... Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act - act in the living Present! Hear within, and God o’erhead. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints in the sands of time... Let us then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"There is no such thing as preaching patience into people unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurly-burly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to and riding out the gale." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamp, that those afar off on the sea may see the shining, and learn their way." - Henry Ward Beecher
"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." -
"Ten Success Rules: Put success before amusement. Learn something every day. Cut free from routine. Concentrate on net profits. Make your services known. Never worry over trifles. Shape your decisions quickly. Acquire skill and technique. Deserve loyalty and co-operation. Value character above all." - Herbert Newton Casson
"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." - Herbert Newton Casson
"Each child’s mind [should go] through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through. The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learned them." - Herbert Spencer
"The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on the wrong iron." - Horace Mann
"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices." - Horace Mann
"A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." - Horace Mann
"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. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known." - Ivan Illich
"The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing, but that it is the external sign of an internal deficiency." - James Bryant Conant
"Conscience in the soul is the root of all true courage. If a man would be brave, let him learn to obey his conscience." - James Freeman Clarke
"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." -
"Learn what a people glory in, and you may learn much of both the theory and practice of their morals." - James Martineau
"All men should strive to learn before they die – what they are running from, and to, and why." - James Thurber, fully James Grover Thurber
"If you wish to learn the highest ideals, begin with the alphabet." - Japanese Proverbs
"If you wish to learn the highest truth, you must begin with the alphabet." - Japanese Proverbs
"One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand - to see that heaven lies about us here in this world." - John Burroughs
"Everything I learn about teaching I learn from bad students." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt