Quotes about learning
page 20

“A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man… stops learning at fourteen or so.”

Source: The Known World

“You have to open up to the world and learn optimism… Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Agnes and the Hitman

Happiness, World, Hope, Optimism

“Jo had learned that hearts, like flowers, cannot be rudely handled, but must open naturally…”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Flowers, Nature, Heart

“You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it.”

Celeste Ng book Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Source: Everything I Never Told You

“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

Books, Reading

“other people maay be there to help us, teach us, guide us aolng our path, But the lesson to be learned is always ours”

Melody Beattie (1948) American writer

People, Help

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Lonesome Traveler (1960)
Context: No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.

Life, Solitude, Dependency, For Men

“Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once to get over the fear of doing it. Twice to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Fear, Time

“The past is the past. You cannot change it, but you can learn from it.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Change, Past

“Life comes at us in waves. We can't predict or control those waves, but we can learn to surf”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Life

“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.”

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American dancer and choreographer

Beauty, Art, Effort

“You are your own worst enemy. If you can learn to stop expecting impossible perfection, in yourself and others, you may find the happiness that has always eluded you.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Happiness, Perfection

“What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: The Life Of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 4

Hope

“I've learned that you can't have everything and do everything at the same time.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Time

“What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

World

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Love, God, War, Fear

“What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.”

Joe Meno book The Boy Detective Fails

Source: The Boy Detective Fails

Life, Death, Disappointment

“Join us next time for Days of the Undead when Rachel learns her long lost brother is really a crown prince from outer space.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Every Which Way But Dead

Time

“Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

People, Baby

“If you had better sense you’d have learned by now that nothing thrives so well as wickedness”

Kathleen Winsor book Forever Amber

Source: Forever Amber

Sense

“We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.”

Bill Russell (1934) American professional basketball player and coach

Hope

“This world has been connected… tied to the darkness… soon to be completely eclipsed… there is very much to learn… you understand so little… a meaningless effort… one who knows nothing cannot understand nothing.”

Shiro Amano (1976) Japanese manga artist

Source: Kingdom Hearts, Vol. 1

World, Understanding, Effort

“Besides, I could hardly complain to the administration that I was being forced to learn magic.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Effort

“When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

“My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Family, Family

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

Way

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”

Caroline Knapp (1959–2002) American writer

Source: Appetites: Why Women Want

Life, World, Waiting, Heart

“Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Love, People

“We decided that sooner or later you had to learn to live without almost everybody, at least for a while. Even people you didn't think you could live without." p 167

love always found itself again.”

Melody Beattie (1948) American writer

Source: The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take

Love, People, Thinking

“Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.”

Mark Helprin book Winter's Tale

Source: Winter's Tale

Summer, Training, Country

“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

Up from Liberalism (1959); also quoted in The American Dissent : A Decade of Modern Conservatism (1966) by Jeffrey Peter Hart, p. 171 Variants: Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views. As quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said about Democrats (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 93 Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view. As quoted in his obituary in The TImes (28 February 2008) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3447250.ece.

“He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
And how to scale a fortress - or a nunnery.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Art

“Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Life

“Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University
Context: The essence of Vanderbilt is still learning, the essence of its outlook is still liberty, and liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of Vanderbilt University and of any free university in this country or the world. I say two touchstones, yet they are almost inseparable, inseparable if not indistinguishable, for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.

“From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.”

Helen Hayes (1900–1993) actress

Love, Books, Parent, Laughter

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

Gilda Radner (1946–1989) American comedian

Way, Perfection

“Leslie had learned two valuable things about the fae that day. They were powerful and charming -- and they ate children and puppies.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

Children

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Suffering

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

Harold Bloom book How to Read and Why

Source: How to Read and Why

Nature, Reading

“ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Love, Life, Water

“Kim was more than a little inclined to snarl at him, but in the past few days she had learned that snarling at Mairelon did little good. He simply smiled and corrected her grammar.”

Patricia C. Wrede (1953) author

Source: A Matter of Magic

Smile, Past

“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Understanding, Change

“Witchcraft to the ignorant,…. Simple science to the learned.”

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Science

“You must learn to forgive a man when he's in love. He's always a nuisance.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Light That Failed

Source: The Light That Failed

Love, Forgiveness

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Wise, Graduation

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.

Information is control.”

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Literature, Reading

“Faith is the courage to live your life as if everything that happens does so for your highest good and learning. Like it or not.”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Source: Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior

Life, Faith, Courage

“Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I don’t want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I’m learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

Thinking

“Live and learn and pass it on.”

H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (1940) American writer

“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Pain

“I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

Love

“When a person sets a thing in motion, there's a feeling of unease, almost regret, until you learn the truth.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Truth, Feeling, Personality

“Time is the school in which we learn”

Joan Didion (1934) American writer

School, Time

“Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

People

“I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

Funny

“He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Truth

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Imagination

“If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

“He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People

“Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

World, Peace, Way

“Maybe that is the best lesson I learned in my first semester at Yale, because if I had gone to a less-demanding school and continued to sail along on the top, I am sure I would never have attained the subsequent achievements in my life.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Life, School

“One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Love, Making love, Feeling

“Humans don’t make sense.”
“If you’re only now learning that,” Kaladin said, “then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Brandon Sanderson book Words of Radiance

Source: Words of Radiance

Sense

“We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Princess Irulan in The Humanity of Muad'Dib
Dune (1965)
Context: Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Training

“The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Source: Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

Pain, Past, Future, Heart

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speedofthought/default.asp 1990s

Business

“Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

Tear, Joy

“You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Cute, Romantic, For Her, love

“You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.”

Sherwood Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio

Source: Winesburg, Ohio

Dreams, Time, Forgetting

“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.”

Marguerite Duras book Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Source: Blue Eyes, Black Hair

Love, People, Kiss, Memory

“I must learn.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

“She wants to learn how to handle a gun.

Well, I want George Clooney naked in my bed, but I haven't attempted kidnapping. Yet.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: The Witness

“I've been going a long time now
along the way I've learned some things.

You have to make the good times yourself
take the little times and make them into big times
and save the times that are all right
for the ones that aren't so good.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Source: Listen to the Warm

Way, Time

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Happiness, Feeling, Mountain

“Be compassionate," Morrie whispered. And take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place."

He took a breath, then added his mantra: "Love each other or die.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Love, World

“The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Love

“Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.”

Dan Brown book The Da Vinci Code

Source: The Da Vinci Code

Life, Secret

“Cloisters, ancient libraries… I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

“One if the hardest things in life to learn are which bridges to cross and which bridges to burn.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Life

“We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

Source: The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love & Compassion

Courage, Past

“A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934) Hungarian American psychologist

Source: Flow: The Psychology of Happiness

Life

“Some things are only real because they represent what we think. When we learn the truth and think it, the old reality is no longer real to us and loses its hold on us. The truth sets us free.”

C. Terry Warner American writer

Source: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

Truth, Thinking, Reality

“I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

God, World

“It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty…”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Beauty, Intelligence

“When one teaches, two learn.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.”

Ally Carter Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Source: Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Memory

“Love is fragile -- she was thinking -- but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love-words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

Source: May Day

Love, Lovers, Thinking

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Men, Money, World, Mountain

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.”

William Kent Krueger book Ordinary Grace

Source: Ordinary Grace

Wisdom, God, Pain, Sleep

“We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”

J.B. Priestley An Inspector Calls

Source: An Inspector Calls

Men, Time, Night

“Learning was of two kinds: the one being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?”

George S. Clason book The Richest Man in Babylon

Source: The Richest Man in Babylon

Training

“I learned that what happened to me did not have to define who I was. My past could not control my future unless I allowed it to.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You

Past, Future

“The mind-is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind-
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Sleep, Heart, Night

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

This is similar to a quote attributed to Mark Twain: "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education". The earliest published source located attributing the quote to Einstein is the 1999 book Career Management for the Creative Person by Lee T. Silber, p. 130 http://books.google.com/books?id=eNjhnHmerfwC&q=%22interferes+with+my+learning%22#search_anchor, while the earliest published source located for the Mark Twain quote is the 1996 book Children at Risk by C. Niall McElwee, p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=p_FEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22never+let+schooling+get+in+the+way+of+my+education%22+%22mark+twain%22#search_anchor. Both quotes appeared on the internet before that: the earliest post located that attributes the quote to Einstein is this one from 11 February 1994 http://groups.google.com/group/rec.travel.air/msg/b1feb7ca5019ab2e, while the earliest located that attributes the variant to Mark Twain is this one from 28 March 1988 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.m68k/msg/9c2f7cdecb11eccb Misattributed

Education

“If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to see the rain.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

“It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”

Marilynne Robinson book Lila

Source: Lila

Quotes about learning page 20

Quotes about learning
page 20