Learning quotes
2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside learning — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment."
"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written."
"No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does."
"With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?"
"I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
"Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve."
"He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical."
"Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before."
"Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues."
"Something the heart must have to cherish, Must love and joy and sorrow learn; Something with passion clasp, or perish And in itself to ashes burn."
"I once heard a learned man say, "Every evil has its remedy, except folly. To reprimand an obstinate fool or to preach to a dolt is like writing upon the water. Christ healed the blind, the halt, the palsied, and the leprous. But the fool He could not cure.""
"The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care."
"No one as ever completed their apprenticeship."
"In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply."
"He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own."
"Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant."
"The chief art of learning is to attempt but a little at a time."
"The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey."
"The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter."
"Nothing has happened in education until it has happened to a student."
