Quotes about learning
page 33

Daniel Radcliffe photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
Husayn ibn Ali photo

“Among the signs of a learned man is criticising his own words and being informed of various viewpoints.”

Husayn ibn Ali (626–680) The grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 119
Regarding Wisdom

Roger Ascham photo

“There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.”

Roger Ascham (1515–1568) English scholar and didactic writer

The Schoolmaster (1570), p. 1

Warren Farrell photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Charles Simic photo

“It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

"A Thieves' Thanksgiving," http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/26/thieves-thanksgiving/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Goya+Ferrante+crooks&utm_content=NYR+Goya+Ferrante+crooks+CID_8376c474295b4e263a32522d2bbfd922&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=A%20Thieves%20Thanksgiving New York Review of Books, November 26, 2014

Karen Armstrong photo
Ram Dass photo

“I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.”

(quoting Timothy Leary's description of the Psilocybin experience).
Be Here Now (1971)

W. Brian Arthur photo
James Hamilton photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Thomas Fuller photo

“Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Of Books.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

“There is really nothing that can be done except by an individual. Only individuals can learn. Only individuals can think creatively. Only individuals can cooperate. Only individuals can combat statism.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

Essays on Liberty (1954), Essays on Liberty https://books.google.com/books?id=SugpAQAAMAAJ&dq=There+is+really+nothing+that+can+be+done+except+by+an+individual.+Only+individuals+can+learn.+Only+individuals+can+think+creatively.+Only+individuals+can+cooperate.+Only+individuals+can+combat+statism.&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22There+is+really+nothing+that+can+be+done+except+by+an+individual.+Only+individuals+can+learn.+Only+individuals+can+think+creatively.+Only+individuals+can+cooperate.+Only+individuals+can+combat+statism.%22

Ernest Hemingway photo

“Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1

Sania Mirza photo
Joseph Campbell photo

“Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, one which demands human sacrifice, so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " The man blind from birth and the Creator's subversion of sin http://girardianlectionary.net/res/fbr_ch-1_john9.htm", p. 20.

Dave Barry photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
Vitruvius photo

“Apollo at Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but have them open to the view. Oh that nature, following his idea, had constructed them thus unfolded and obvious to the view.”
Delphicus Apollo Socratem omnium sapientissimum Pythiae responsis est professus. Is autem memoratur prudenter doctissimeque dixisse, oportuisse hominum pectora fenestrata et aperta esse, uti non occultos haberent sensus sed patentes ad considerandum. Utinam vero rerum natura sententiam eius secuta explicata et apparentia ea constituisset!

Preface, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5779. Wise Men learn by other Men's Harms; Fools, by their own.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Edward Said photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Ben Carson photo

“I think one of the keys to leadership is recognizing that everybody has gifts and talents. A good leader will learn how to harness those gifts toward the same goal.”

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

As quoted in "America's Best Leaders: Benjamin Carson, Surgeon and Children's Advocate" http://www.usnews.com/news/best-leaders/articles/2008/11/19/americas-best-leaders-benjamin-carson-surgeon-and-childrens-advocate, U.S. News (November 19, 2008)

Hesiod photo

“Only when he has suffered does the fool learn.”

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 218.

Ed Bradley photo

“I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[John Sears, RTNDA Communicator, RTNDA; The Association; Radio Television Digital News Association; Volume 54, August 2000, Interview with Ed Bradley]

Chris Rock photo

“Community college is like a disco with books: "Here's ten dollars; let me get my learn on!"”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Bring the Pain (HBO, 1996)

Henry Adams photo
Harold Lloyd photo

“I find that I would like now, best of all, to be a good conversationalist. I know I'm not one at present. Oh, I can sit and talk a little of this and that, but I realize that I haven't any definite or profound knowledge. I won't be satisfied with just a patter, a surface glaze of information. I don't want short-cuts to learning. I want to know all about the thing I study.
I'd like to be able to hold my own, to meet on a common ground, with scientists, inventors, clerics, doctors, athletes, authors.
The most worthwhile thing in life is to store your mind with knowledge.
I wish now that I had been able to go to college, if only so that I might have had appreciations earlier in the game.
People often say to me now that I have my home, my career, fame (if you call it that), there must be nothing left for me to live for. But there is everything left to live for. All the things I don't know about, all the things I want to know about.
Pictures, I've discovered, were practically all I did know about up to very recently. I've had to work so hard, to concentrate so closely, that I never have had time to read or to travel or to think about other things. I'm just at the beginning of living…”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"Discoveries About Myself". Motion Picture, October 1930, pg. 58 & 90. (Brewster Publications). https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n563/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n595/mode/2up

Umberto Eco photo
Mia Farrow photo

“I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving.”

Mia Farrow (1945) American actress, singer, humanitarian and former fashion model

What Falls Away (1997)

Mark Satin photo

“Not long after Miles and Eric hitch to St. Louis, Graham turns to me and says, "Let's hitch to Chicago!" "Right now?" I ask, peering up from my American government text. "Why not?" says Graham. "You've got to learn to do things when you want to; otherwise you'll be just like one of the plastic people, the dead people."”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

So by one A.M. we are on the road. ...
Page 40. It's the fall of 1964. Satin is a freshman at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. "Plastic" became one of his favorite adjectives.
Confessions of a Young Exile (1976)

Paul Desmond photo

“Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.”

Paul Desmond (1924–1977) American jazz musician

Unsourced

Thomas Jefferson photo

“Children till 10. years old to serve as nurses. from 10. to 16. the boys make nails, the girls spin. at 16. go into the ground or learn trades.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Jefferson's Farm Book as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2012)
Attributed

Linda McCartney photo
Djuna Barnes photo

“Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.”

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) American Modernist writer, poet and artist

Letter to Emily Holmes Coleman (2 February 1934) http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/library.htm

John Milton photo

“The end of learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love Him and imitate Him.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364

Alan Hirsch photo

“In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 193

Michele Bachmann photo
Bert McCracken photo
Koichi Tohei photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“[Boulding grasps the significance of sociobiology's emphasis on biogenetics] that there are biogenetic factors in learning capacity and potential can hardly be denied… [yet] biogenetically imposed limits to human learning… seem to be much more remote… than are the limitations imposed by the biogenetic structure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 21 as cited in: W.R. Brown and M.J. Schaefermeyer (1980) "Progress in communication as a social science". In: Dan Nimmo eds. Communication Yearbook 4. p. 38

Thomas Warton photo
H.L. Mencken photo
Herman Wouk photo
Konrad Heiden photo
Charles, Prince of Wales photo
Maria Mitchell photo
E.M. Forster photo
Willa Cather photo
Jim Carrey photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“I still haven’t learned to deal with situations like that very well — but I don’t think you should, because then you’re accepting defeat. It’s good to be stubborn, to be hard on yourself.”

Jo Ankier (1982) British athlete and television personality

On leading all the way through a race and being beaten at the finish.
Jewish Chronicle, 17 August 2007, p. 11-12: "The calendar girl who's going for gold"

Thomas Sowell photo

“Republicans won big, running as Republicans, in 2004. But once they took control of Congress, they started acting like Democrats and lost big. There is a lesson in that somewhere but whether Republicans will learn it is another story entirely.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Random Thoughts http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/08/26/random_thoughts?page=full&comments=true, 26 August 2008.
2000s

Laurence Sterne photo
John Dewey photo
John Eatwell, Baron Eatwell photo
Timothy Leary photo
James Fenimore Cooper photo

“Parson Amen's speculations on this interesting subject, although this may happen to be the first occasion on which he has ever heard the practice of taking scalps justified by Scripture. Viewed in a proper spirit, they ought merely to convey a lesson of humility, by rendering apparent the wisdom, nay the necessity, of men's keeping them-selves within the limits of the sphere of knowledge they were designed to fill, and convey, when rightly considered, as much of a lesson to the Puseyite, with abstractions that are quite as unintelligible to himself as they are to others; to the high-wrought and dogmatical Calvinist, who in the midst of his fiery zeal, forgets that love is the very essence of the relation between God and man; to the Quaker, who seems to think the cut of a coat essential to salvation; to the descendant of the Puritan, who whether he be Socinian, Calvinist, Universalist, or any other "1st," appears to believe that the "rock" on which Christ declared he would found his church was the "Rock of Plymouth"; and to the unbeliever, who, in deriding all creeds, does not know where to turn to find one to substitute in their stead. Humility, in matters of this sort, is the great lesson that all should teach and learn; for it opens the way to charity, and eventually to faith, and through both of these to hope; finally, through all of these, to heaven.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Source: Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848), Ch. XI

Albert Barnes photo
Tom Petty photo
Robert Boyle photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Robert Penn Warren photo

“So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"Bearded Oaks", Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942)

Frank Stella photo
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo
Elfriede Jelinek photo
Yehudi Menuhin photo

“Learning an imposed method seemed not in my nature”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Quote from his autobiography,Unfinished Journey”
Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

William Least Heat-Moon photo
Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries photo
Chester W. Wright photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“To learn about oneself, a living thing, you have to watch, learn anew each minute.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

4th Public Talk, Bombay (Mumbai), India (17 February 1971)
1970s

Francisco Varela photo

“Learning is most often considered a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical.”

David A. Kolb (1939) American psychologist

[Kolb, DA, Osland JS, Rubin IM, Organizational Behavior: an experiential approach, 1971, 7, 2001, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, English, 42]

Mike Tyson photo

“[Cus D'Amato] told me, 'You're the type of guy who has to be hurt to learn.' I'm pissed off today because he was right about everything.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm?csp=34
On his family

Murray N. Rothbard photo
Hermann Hesse photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Peter M. Senge photo

“Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.”

Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–1963) American historian

Quoted by John F. Kennedy in a speech at Yale University (11 June 1962).

William Hague photo
W. Edwards Deming photo

“Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Deming: The Way We Knew Him http://books.google.com/books?id=VKBz5RW5yFcC&pg=PA125&dq=%22learning+is+not+compulsory%22+%22+survival%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fcqtUtH0BYbioATs44HQAw&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBjgy#v=onepage&q=%22learning%20is%20not%20compulsory%22%20%22%20survival%22&f=false (1995)
This quote is often cited as “Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.”

Philip Schaff photo

“Editions and Revisions. The printed Bible text of Luther had the same fate as the written text of the old Itala and Jerome's Vulgate. It passed through innumerable improvements and mis-improvements. The orthography and inflections were modernized, obsolete words removed, the versicular division introduced (first in a Heidelberg reprint, 1568), the spurious clause of the three witnesses inserted in 1 John 5:7 (first by a Frankfurt publisher, 1574), the third and fourth books of Ezra and the third book of the Maccabees added to the Apocrypha, and various other changes effected, necessary and unnecessary, good and bad. Elector August of Saxony tried to control the text in the interest of strict Lutheran orthodoxy, and ordered the preparation of a standard edition (1581). But it was disregarded outside of Saxony.
Gradually no less than eleven or twelve recensions came into use, some based on the edition of 1545, others on that of 1546. The most careful recension was that of the Canstein Bible Institute, founded by a pious nobleman, Carl Hildebrand von Canstein (1667-1719) in connection with Francke's Orphan House at Halle. It acquired the largest circulation and became the textus receptus of the German Bible.
With the immense progress of biblical learning in the present century, the desire for a timely revision of Luther's version was more and more felt. Revised versions with many improvements were prepared by Joh.- Friedrich von Meyer, a Frankfurt patrician (1772-1849), and Dr. Rudolf Stier (1800-1862), but did not obtain public authority.
At last a conservative official revision of the Luther Bible was inaugurated by the combined German church governments in 1863, with a view and fair prospect of superseding all former editions in public use.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

E. L. James photo

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

Charlton Ogburn (1911–1998) American journalist and author

From "Merrill's Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure" http://www.harpers.org/archive/1957/01/0007289 in the January 1957 issue of Harper's Magazine
Usually misattributed to Petronius
See Brown, David S. "Petronius or Ogburn?", <i>Public Administration Review</i>, Vol. 38, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1978), p. 296 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-3352(197805%2F06)38%3A3%3C296%3APOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z
<p>alternate version:</p><p>As a result, I suppose, of high-level changes of mind about how we were to be used, we went though several reorganizations. Perhaps because Americans as a nation have a gift for organizing, we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization, and a wonderful method it is for creating the illusion of progress at the mere cost of confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.</p>
The Maurauders (1959)
chapter 2, page 60

Errico Malatesta photo

“What matters most is that people, all men, lose their sheepish instincts and habits that the millennial slavery inspired them, and they learn to think and act freely.”

Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) Italian anarchist

Ciò che più importa è che il popolo, gli uomini tutti, perdano gli istinti e le abitudini pecorili che la millenaria schiavitù ha loro ispirato ed apprendano a pensare ed agire liberamente.
Scritti: "Pensiero e volontá," rivista quindicinale di studi sociali e di coltura generale (Roma, 1924-1926) e ultimi scritti (1926-1932) [Writings: "Thought and Will," fortnightly magazine of social studies and culture general (Rome, 1924-1926) and later writings (1926-1932)], Vol. 3, p. 317; this is also quoted in the message on an Anarchist white stone monument in Pozzuoli, Italy, with simply "Gli anarchici" [The anarchists] appended to the statement.