1,243 Learning Quotes

It is the enemy who can truly teach us to practice the virtues of compassion and tolerance.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.

There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

I approach cooking from a science angle because I need to understand how things work. If I understand the egg, I can scramble it better. It's a simple as that.

I loved doing problems in school.

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Education is the best provision for old age.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.

In order to keep an open mind, I am trying to avoid learning anything.

If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.

I always like to know what I'm doing, but there are times when nobody will tell me.

Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.

It's easier to learn many other things, if you first learn how to learn.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it - this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience, and experience only,' I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'

Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

Observation-activity of both eyes and ears.

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. (B 1)

Thus all human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. (B 730)

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

Jack: Gee, I never thought of that.

I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.

I feel I'm happily inspired now on Classical soil: The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly. Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight. But at night Love keeps me busy another way: I become half a scholar but twice as contented. And am I not learning, studying the shape Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?

Doubt grows with knowledge.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

Only when we know little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge.

Learn from your mistakes and build on your successes.

Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.

Whence thy learning? Hath thy toil O'er books consumed the midnight oil?

Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, he walks in the midst of wonders.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

No man is the wiser for his learning.

Wit and wisdom are born with a man.

I want to keep growing and learning as much as possible. I want to fill myself in on all aspects of the industry - acting and directing. (1988)

I began acting, and I thought, Well, this is an interesting road; maybe I should keep traveling on it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I started to read everything about acting - Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Michael Chekhov. I started soaking it up. (2004)

One of the most important things I learned in the couple of times I worked with Marlon Brando, and just by spending time with him, is it's okay to have a ball. It's okay to have fun and fuck up because, after all, it's only film. If you're able to get to a place where maybe your only motivation in the scene is to make the crew giggle, that's okay too. (2003)

was 12 when my mom bought me a $25 electric guitar. I had an uncle who was a preacher, and his family had a gospel singing group. He played guitar in church, and I used to watch him. I became obsessed with the guitar. I locked myself in my bedroom for the better part of a year and taught myself chords. I'd try to learn things off records. (2004)

I'm interested in all religion. (2004)

I like being confused, I enjoy the look it leaves on my face.

If you haven't made some mistakes by 28, it's abnormal.

Our experience is composed rathery of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

I was thirty-two when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.

I have many regrets, and I'm sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret if you have any sense, and if you don't regret them, maybe you're stupid.

Buying books is probably my biggest vice when I travel. I bought a great one in America called An Incomplete Education, which covers everything from fashion to philosophy in quite a humorous way. It's a bluffer's guide, but pretty extensive. Because I never went to university, it's my attempt to bone up on subjects I don't know much about.

Long time no see. I only pray the caliber of your questions has improved.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints - without working one - one single miracle with them?

I am convinced, Yorick, continued my father, half reading and half discoursing, that there is a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it.

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

If you gotta ask, you'll never know.

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.

You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-frustrated wishes. The Genius of Mozart is mourning and weeping over the death of her pupil. She has found a refuge but no occupation with the inexhaustible Haydn; through him she wishes to form a union with another. With the help of assiduous labor you shall receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands.

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (6.54)

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules - it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. (p. 25)

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (129)

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say 'yes' to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say 'I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same.'

310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says 'Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all.'

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up 'What's that?' - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said 'this is a man,' 'this is a house,' etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? (p. 17e)