Quotes about learning
page 2

“I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.”

Hunter S. Thompson The Rum Diary

Source: The Rum Diary

“But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.”

Hesiod Greek poet

Source: Works and Days and Theogony

Failure, Thinking

“What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

Hope

“From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom”

Thomas Paine book Common Sense

Source: Common Sense

Wisdom, Error

“if you learn to hate one or two persons… you'll soon hate millions of people.”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Hate, People, Personality

“To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Art, Study, Science

“Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because it is the nature of his lot, for good or bad.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Nature

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

Source: 1910s, My Larger Education, Being Chapters from My Experience (1911), Ch. V: The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob (pg. 118)

People, Business

“A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

Teachers

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

British Telecom advertisement (1993), part of which was used in Pink Floyd's Keep Talking (1994) and Talkin' Hawkin'<nowiki/> (2014)
Context: For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Imagination, Animals

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Attributed in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 132, and many places on the internet, this was actually stated by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Anthon van Rappard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_van_Rappard (18 August 1885) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html, also rendered "I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it." Misattributed Variant: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

History

“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Friendship, World, School, Friendship

“It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island

Past, Forgetting

“Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you'll ever have is your mind and what you put into it.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Fools, Question, Wise

“You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

Change

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Light, Reading

“If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don't just be mad at him or her”

Denzel Washington (1954) actor, screenwriter, director, producer

Madness

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“Wise is the one who learns from another´s mistakes. Less wise is the one who learns only from his own mistakes. The fool keeps making the same mistakes again and again and never learns from them.”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (1956) spiritual leader

Source: Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge 1995-2000

Fools

“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”

Brandon Mull Fablehaven

Source: Fablehaven

People

“Wise? No, I simply learned to think.”

Christopher Paolini book Eldest

Source: Eldest

Thinking

“…as I grew up, we spent a lot of time learning things about the world that most youngsters in cities don’t learn these days.”

Clair Cameron Patterson (1922–1995) American chemist and geochemist

In a Interview With Shirley K. Cohen http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/32/1/OH_Patterson.pdf

World, Time

“The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. … Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Wisconsin: Flambeau”, p. 113.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"

Youth, Travel, Freedom

“Few are the women and maidens who would let themselves think that one could at the same time be joyous and modest. They are all bold and coarse in their speech, in their demeanor wild and lewd. That is now the fashion of being in good cheer. But it is specially evil that the young maiden folk are exceedingly bold of speech and bearing, and curse like troopers, to say nothing of their shameful words and scandalous coarse sayings, which one always hears and learns from another.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Women, Fashion, Thinking, Evil

“I gotta big mouth, I can't help it, I talk from my heart, I'm real you know what I'm sayin whatever comes comes. But my controverse problems, It's not my fault, I try to find my way in the world you know, I try to be somebody instead of just, make money off of everybody. You know what im saying, so I go down paths that haven't been traveled before and I usually mess up, but I learn, you know what I'm saying, I come back stronger, I'm not talking ignorant, you know what I'm saying. So obviously put thought into what I do. So I think my mouth, my controverse, I have not been out of the paper since I joined Digital Underground, I've been in all, you know what I'm saying, my name has not been not uttered, you know what I'm saying, and that's good for me because I don't wanna be forgotten. If I'm forgotten then that means I'm comfortable and that means I think everything is okay.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

1990s, MTV interview (1994)

Money, World, Way, Travel

“The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Tractate of Education (1644)

Parent

“Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

p 53.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

Men, Money

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? … By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, that father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Matka Tereza (1910–1997) Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin

National Prayer Breakfast speech, Washington, D.C. (3 February 1994) http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/abortion/ab0039.html. 1990s

Love, Women, War, People

“I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) Uruguayan writer

Galeano, in: David Barsamian (2004) Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine. p. 146

People, Personality

“Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.”

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) German, later British Baroque composer

Händel ist der Größte und Fähigste aller Komponisten; von ihm kann ich immer noch lernen. Beethoven on his deathbed, speaking to Gerhard von Breuning. Published in Friedrich Kerst Beethoven der Mann und der Künstler, wie in seinen Eigenen Words enthüllt no. 111 http://www.bucheralle.org/6C76626D613131/ch35.html; Friedrich Kerst (trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel) Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words (1964), p. 54. Criticism

“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

Life, Time

“You don't learn anything in school. It's just a waste of time. You lug around books and all and do homework. They give too much homework. You shouldn't be doing homework. Nobody's interested in it. The teachers are stupid. They shouldn't have any women in there. They don't know how to teach. And they shouldn't make anyone go to school. You don't want to go, you don't go, that's all. It's ridiculous. I don't remember one thing I learned in school. I don't listen to weakies. My two and a half years in Erasmus High I wasted. I didn't like the whole thing. You have to mix with all those stupid kids. The teachers are even stupider than the kids. They talk down to the kids. Half of them are crazy. If they'd have let me, I would have quit before I was sixteen.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1960s, Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master (1961)

Women, Books, Stupidity, School

“I have given my life to try to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here like I must learn and know: that these individuals are a sub-race. They have neither the intellectual, mental, or emotional abilities to equate or to share equally with white men in any function of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: the superior and they the inferior. For whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equals they will either destroy him or devour him. And they will destroy all of his work. Let white men from anywhere in the world, who would come to Africa, remember that you must continually retain this status; you the master and they the inferior like children that you would help or teach. Never fraternize with them as equals. Never accept them as your social equals or they will devour you. They will destroy you.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

This has usually been presented as something "said shortly before his death" without any definite source, but appears to be entirely spurious. The "FAQ about the life and thoughts of Albert Schweitzer" http://www.schweitzer.org/faq?lang=en#rasist asserts "This quote is utterly false and is an outrageously inaccurate picture of Dr. Schweitzer’s view of Africans. Dr. Schweitzer never said or wrote anything remotely like this. It does NOT appear in the book African Notebook." This refers to some citations of it being from Afrikanische Geschichten (1938), which was translated as From My African Notebook (1939) by Mrs. C. E. B Russell Misattributed

Life, Men, Children, World

“Don't confuse poor decision making with destiny. Own your mistakes. It's OK; we all make them. Learn from them so they can empower you!”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 144

Decision

“Those who read and rightly understand my teaching will not start an insurrection; they have not learned that from me.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Source: A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion (1522), p. 65

Understanding, Reading

“I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

Interviewed by David Ewen in The Etude, 1941; cited from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern Universities Press, 1997) pp. 235-6

School, Law, Music

“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 92.
Context: Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass,
The mere materials with which wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

Wisdom, Knowledge

“When you aren’t willing to pay the price of learning by changing you will eventually pay the price of losing.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

Change

“I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.”

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) French painter and printmaker

Art, Understanding, Painting

“This is hard work:
1. Inspiring
2. Learning
3. Teaching
4. Trusting
5. Empowering
6. Sponsoring
7. Committing
8. Unselfishly giving
9. Loving
10. Nurturing”

Ralph Smart

Love, Making love

“You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

In Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program (2005) by Rebecca Herold, p. 101

Way, Understanding

“The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Secret, Past

“A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism

Source: "An Essay on Criticism", (1709)

Spring, Drink

“We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time… detached.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

Source: La Dolce Vita: Federico Fellini's Masterpiece

Love, Art, Passion, Time

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Not found in Twain's works, this was attributed to him in Reader's Digest (September 1939): no prior attribution known. Mark Twain’s father died when Twain was eleven years old.
Disputed
Variant: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Boy, Father's Day, For Father

“Each of us has been made “a little lower than the angels.” What an incomprehensible compliment! But it’s not only a compliment; it’s also a responsibility, for our special status equalizes us with other people in the eyes of God. The Lord has exalted not only me or some special group; God has exalted everyone. It’s the people of Burkina Faso and Niger and Guyana and Haiti. It’s people who never learned to read and write or who live on fifty cents a day. All human beings have been made a little lower than the angels, and we have a responsibility to treat them accordingly.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President

God, People, Angels, Reading

“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

World, Joy, Courageous

“Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Fear, Graduation

“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.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Life, Life, Peaceful

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: " A Case of Voluntary Ignorance http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBooksWP/2013/11/a-case-of-voluntary-ignorance-by-aldous-huxley/" in Collected Essays (1959)

Men, History

“It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Past, Drawing

“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”

Alice Munro (1931) Canadian novelist

People, Time

“Anyhow, I've learned one thing now. You only really get to know people when you've had a jolly good row with them. Then and then only can you judge their true characters!”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Variant translation: The only way to truly know a person is to argue with them. For when they argue in full swing, then they reveal their true character.
28 September 1942
Variant: I've learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl (1942 - 1944)

People

“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Books, Feeling

“And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

Terry Pratchett book Unseen Academicals

Source: Unseen Academicals

Pain, World, Nature, Universe

“Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding."”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Physics and Philosophy (1958)
Source: Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
Context: Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding."

Hope, Understanding, Time

“In some cases we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”

Lloyd Alexander book The Book of Three

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book I: The Book of Three (1964), Chapter 1
Context: "Why?" Dallben interrupted. "In some cases," he said, "we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."

Question

“Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”

Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) fashion designer

“It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Time

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Happiness, Fight, Happy

“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The
willingness to learn is a choice.”

Brian Herbert book House Harkonnen

Source: House Harkonnen

Motivational, Funny, Deep, Success

“If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.”

M. Scott Peck (1936–2005) American psychiatrist

Way

“An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot, unless we have become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, forget that we are living in a class society from which there is no way out, nor can there be, save through the class struggle. In every class society, whether based on slavery, serfdom, or, as at present, wage-labor, the oppressor class is always armed. Not only the modern standing army, but even the modern militia - and even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, Switzerland, for instance - represent the bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat. That is such an elementary truth that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it. Suffice it to point to the use of troops against strikers in all capitalist countries.
A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society. And in face of this fact, revolutionary Social-Democrats are urged to “demand” “disarmament”! That is tantamount of complete abandonment of the class-struggle point of view, to renunciation of all thought of revolution. Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from, and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism. Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap. And the proletariat will undoubtedly do this, but only when this condition has been fulfilled, certainly not before.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution

Truth, World, Way, Country

“One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

Boy, Teachers

“What I learned on my own I still remember”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Communion: The Female Search for Love

Love, Search, Personality, For women

“Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Question, Thinking

“I learned how to stop crying.
I learned how to hide inside of myself.
I learned how to be somebody else.
I learned how to be cold and numb.”

Sherman Alexie book Flight

Source: Flight

Cry

“We have seen many rich persons, many powerful persons, many famous persons, many beautiful persons, many learned and scholarly persons, and persons in the renounced order of life unattached to material possessions. But we have never seen any one person who is unlimitedly and simultaneously wealthy, powerful, famous, beautiful, wise and unattached, like Kṛṣṇa, in the history of humanity. Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is a historical person who appeared on this earth 5,000 years ago. He stayed on this earth for 125 years and played exactly like a human being, but His activities were unparalleled. From the very moment of His appearance to the moment of His disappearance, every one of His activities is unparalleled in the history of the world, and therefore anyone who knows what we mean by Godhead will accept Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead. No one is equal to the Godhead, and no one is greater than Him. That is the import of the familiar saying “God is great.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Source: Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead

Life, God, World, Beauty

“It is at moments like these that I know my what my purpose is in life. I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return. I am here because there is no other place to be.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Love, Life

“There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.”

Christopher Paolini book Eragon

Source: Eragon

Life, Books, Cry

“The first lesson every child of Athena learned: Mom was the best at everything, and you should never, suggest otherwise.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Moms

“…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

Source: Facing the Lion, Being the Lion: Finding Inner Courage Where It Lives

Bird, Fish, Teachers, Water

“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

Life, Men, Fear, Idea

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 7, Marx, Marshall and Keynes, p. 75

Question, Study

“I am not wise, but I can always learn.”

Tamora Pierce The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

Source: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

“No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Thinking, Help

“Every day, sincerely and without phoniness, Lou demonstrated by his actions how very vital it is - more than anything else - to understand and appreciate the people who work with you…. Do your job well, learn your job well, but always remember that the people you work with are your most valuable asset. Embrace them. Honor them. Respect them" (206) "Prescriptions for Success" by John Schuerholz”

Denzel Washington (1954) actor, screenwriter, director, producer

Source: A Hand to Guide Me

People, Understanding, Success, Sincerity

“And then many things became very clear… we learned perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Life, Time

“I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Three Men in a Boat

Source: Three Men in a Boat

School, Understanding

“I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Quote in a letter to Ella Wolfe, "Wednesday 13," 1938, as cited in Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera (1983) ISBN 0-06-091127-1 , p. 197. In a footnote (p.467), Herrera writes that Kahlo had heard this joke from her friend, the poet José Frías.
1925 - 1945
Variant: I tried to drown my sorrows but the bastards learned how to swim.