Education quotes
3.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside education — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing."
"Persistent questioning and healthy inquisitiveness are the first requisite for acquiring learning of any kind."
"It is hard to apply oneself to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging. I almost never explain these things when folks are asking me why I don't do this or that."
"A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine."
"Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn."
"We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man."
"We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our find schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last."
"If a woman seeks education it is probably because her sexual apparatus is malfunctioning."
"The consequences of these institutions (The towns or districts, the congregations, the schools,and the militia.) have been, that the inhabitants, having acquired from their infancy the habit of discussing, of deliberating, and of judging of public affairs, it was in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people were formed in the first place, and their resolutions were taken from the beginning to the end of the disputes and the war with Great Britain."
"Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use."
"Education should bring to light the ideal of the individual."
"University: ... a place where rich men send their sons who have no aptitude for business."
"First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place."
"It's not burn baby burn, but learn, baby, learn, so that you can earn, baby, earn."
"Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person."
"Now, a good education is about so much more than just learning geometry or memorizing dates in history. All of that is important, but an education is also about exploring new things -- discovering what makes you come alive, and then being your best at whatever you choose"
"Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred."
"As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated."
"When will society, like a mother, take care of all her children?"
"It is the intelligent and highly educated that agonize over their limitations."
