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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"The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't."
"In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it."
"The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds."
"Apart from my children, spending time with refugees was the greatest gift... the greatest life lesson I could ever receive."
"You will have to learn many tedious things,...which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination, but in anatomy it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all."
"Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity."
"O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed."
"The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own."
"I am too old to fawn upon a nurse, Too far in years to be a pupil now."
"In such business Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant More learned than the ears."
"Babylon, Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh That would lament her."
"Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn."
"Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of society is not natural to mankind."
"It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization."
"A man should carry nature in his head."
"A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own."
"Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, and all flock to their aid."
"Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn."
"Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules."
"Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star."
