Quotes about learning
page 42

“The Definition in the Elements, according to Clavius, is this: Magnitudes are said to be in the same Reason [ratio], a first to a second, and a third to a fourth, when the Equimultiples of the first and third according to any Multiplication whatsoever are both together either short of, equal to, or exceed the Equimultiples of the second and fourth, if those be taken, which answer one another…. Such is Euclid’s Definition of Proportions; that scare-Crow at which the over modest or slothful Dispositions of Men are generally affrighted: they are modest, who distrust their own Ability, as soon as a Difficulty appears, but they are slothful that will not give some Attention for the learning of Sciences; as if while we are involved in Obscurity we could clear ourselves without Labour. Both of 300 which Sorts of Persons are to be admonished, that the former be not discouraged, nor the latter refuse a little Care and Diligence when a Thing requires some Study.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 388

Men, Study, Appearance, Science

“A man … found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (2003)

Happiness, Sadness, Way, Mountain

“I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

War, Fear, Color

“Each child was supposed to clip an item from a newspaper, absorb its contents, and reveal them to the class. This practice allegedly overcame a variety of evils: standing in front of his fellows encouraged good posture and gave a child poise; delivering a short talk made him word-conscious; learning his current event strengthened his memory; being singled out made him more than ever anxious to return to the Group.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Memory, Evil

“The maintenance of equilibrium in forward flight is a matter of practice, and can only be learned by repeated personal experiment.”

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) German aviation pioneer

The Romance of Aeronautics (1912)

Personality

“Nobody really wants to spend life with someone who has no other choice, and children who have been raised by a mother who gave up her life for them almost always spend years on an analyst's couch learning to spit in her eye.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Life, Children

“The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 12 (p. 200)

“When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Professor Quirrell in Ch. 73 http://hpmor.com/chapter/73 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)

Personality

“Everything you do is an opportunity cost. Learn to say “No””

Randy Pausch (1960–2008) American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design

Time Management (2007)

“Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator's hands, and the purchase of the Redeemer's blood, before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 457.

Life, Men, God, Angels

“Chase was easy in command and that ease did not diminish his authority, but simply made the men work harder. […] Sharpe watched Chase for he reckoned he had still a lot to learn about the subtle business of leading men. He saw that the Captain did not secure his authority by recourse to punishment, but rather by expecting high standards and rewarding them. He also hid his doubts.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe, p. 178
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Trafalgar (2000)

Men, Business

“Now, there are two different attitudes towards learning from others. One is the dogmatic attitude of transplanting everything, whether or not it is suited to our conditions. This is no good. The other attitude is to use our heads and learn those things that suit our conditions, that is, to absorb whatever experience is useful to us. That is the attitude we should adopt.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 学习有两种态度。一种是教条主义的态度，不管我国情况，适用的和不适用的，一起搬来。这种态度不好。另一种态度，学习的时候用脑筋想一下，学那些和我国情况相适合的东西，即吸取对我们有益的经验，我们需要的是这样一种态度

“Well, I think the way you feel as a teenager stays with you, forever. I really believe that. And we try to change and we hope that we change, but we don't really in big ways, in serious ways. I think the personality is formed at that time, for the good and for the bad. … We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way. But, I don't know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From a radio interview by Jed the fish (1997)
In interviews etc., About life and death

People, Hope, Way, Feeling

“Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.”

Stanisław Lem book His Master's Voice

Preface
His Master's Voice (1968)

God, Truth, Lie, Angels

“How is it possible not to strive to know what the awakening minds of the young are eager to learn from us? It is little less than criminal that we should put them off with foolish speech or lies.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 183-184

“And it is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

Letter to Washington, 11 November 1794

“I was traveling in Greece as a teenager, and for those who haven't been to Greece, it's absolutely covered in olive groves — stunted, gnarly little bonsai-type trees. And I was driving on a moped and a huge black stallion had pulled away from its stake and was just going nuts in this tiny, tiny, hobbit-like forest. It was just such a powerful image, this enormous beast let loose and going wild in a fairy-tale wood of tiny trees… The song itself is really about going through the process of making the first album. It was a very strange experience and a very steep learning curve. For the previous 10 or 15 years, I'd been completely my own boss — when you play a gig, you just play your new song, the new song is always your favorite. And here I was having to make an album of stuff that's never gonna go away. I was being asked to make these huge decisions, so really the song is just about learning to listen to your guts again. There's actually very few times in our lives now when we have to do that.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

On influences in writing her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree", in a Barnes & Noble Interview with David Sprague (February 2006).

Travel, Decision, Tree, Time

“I learned have, not to despise,
What ever thing seemes small in common eyes.”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Visions of the Worlds Vanitie (1591), line 69

“I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 5-6

Patience

“Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight:
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"The Preacher and the Slave" (1911)

World, Freedom, Singing, Fight

“Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Last paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World, Dreams, Art, Way

“If he'd been in the military, he would have learned gun safety.”

Chuck Hagel (1946) United States Secretary of Defense

[Andrew, Stephen, http://www.newstatesman.com/200602270021, Deputy Dick: What We Don't Know, New Statesman, 27 February 2006, 2006-10-16]
2006

“It is the responsibility of each of us—every man, woman, and child on this planet—to try to lessen the total amount of suffering in our world. … Speciesism, like racism, is a learned attitude, and both can be unlearned.”

Seba Johnson (1973) Olympic skier

"Taking the Lessons My Mother Taught Me to the African-American Community" http://www.satyamag.com/oct02/johnson.html, Satya (October 2002).

World, Suffering

“Investigating chemical reactions can be greatly complicated and often obscured by the presence of extraneous materials. So, the first step, therefore, is to learn how to analyze and classify materials to ensure that you are working with pure substances before initiating any reactions.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 1 : The Atom in Modern Chemistry

“It is thought by many, and said by some, that this republic has already seen its best days; that the historian may now write the story of its decline and fall. Two classes of men are just now especially afflicted with such forebodings. The first are those who are croakers by nature. The men who have a taste for funerals, and especially national funerals. They never see the bright side of anything, and probably never will. Like the raven in the lines of Edgar A. Poe, they have learned two words, and those are, 'never more'. They usually begin by telling us what we never shall see. Their little speeches are about as follows: You will never see such statesmen in the councils of the Nations as Clay, Calhoun and Webster. You will never see the south morally reconstructed and our once happy people again united. You will never see this Government harmonious and successful while in the hands of different races. You will never make the negro work without a master, or make him an intelligent voter, or a good and useful citizen. This last never is generally the parent of all the other little 'nevers' that follow.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Happiness, People, Intelligence

“England totally disarmed and an easy prey to hostile forces! Can you think of anything more likely to excite cupidity and hostile intention? We should sink to the level of a fifth rate Power, our Colonies would be stripped from us, our commerce would decline, famine and unemployment would stalk the land. … I share your longing for peace. God forbid that it should be again disturbed! The constant and undivided effort of the Government is for its preservation. But I have yet to learn that the cause of peace can be served by rendering our country impotent.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Arthur Ponsonby (16 December 1927); published in Semi-detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945 (2000) by Martin Ceadel, p. 271
1927

God, Hostility, Peace, Thinking

“There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p. 12

Failure

“Yet the world has never thoroughly learned this lesson It has never been willing entirely to acknowledge this principle. One of the greatest needs of the present day is the establishment and recognition of standards, and holding ourselves up to their proper observance. This cannot be done without constant effort and it will meet constant opposition. Always there have been those who fail to recognize this necessity. Their opposition to it and their philosophy of life were well expressed by Robert Burns in that poem which describes the carousings of a collection of vagabonds, where one of them gave his views: 'A fig for those by law protected! Liberty's a glorious feast! Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, World, Law, Effort

“When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 1 Early French Adventure in North America
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

World, Peace, Parting, Sea

“… the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one [… ] as one learns, he changes the design [… ]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

Change

“I need a map of your head, translated into English, so I can learn to not make you frown.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Make Yourself (1999)

“Being a professional journalist is rather like training to be a lawyer. There's a certain amount you can learn in school but largely it is a vocation learned through practice, with scepticism being a primary attribute.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 70.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

School, Training

“A crown is more discomfort than adornment. If you have learned that, you have already learned much.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book V : The High King (1968), Chapter 1 (Dallben)

“A man cannot tell whether a woman is in love with him or his security blanket until she is financially and psychologically independent enough to leave. Until a woman has learned how to leave, even she cannot be sure she has learned to love.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 182.

Love

“There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Children, Family, Mood, Nature

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Paradise (1997)

Love, Life, God, Marriage

“I didn't get the point", said Pig. "That's because you've got four pounds of provolone where most people got brains!", Mark shouted, shaking his fist. "This is college, you dumb bastard. This is a place where you're supposed to argue and learn and get pissed off. You don't go around choking your buddies just because they don't happen to believe what you believe.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline (1980), p. 88

People

“We've got a lot of young guys. A lot of good, young guys. But young guys can go out there and learn how to win quickly. I feel good about the guys behind me. I know that if I'm not in there, they'll do just as well as me.”

Emmitt Smith (1969) American football player and sports broadcaster

Robbie Andreu (August 31, 1989) "New and Improved Emmitt Slimmed Down Florida Running Back Emmitt Smith Insists That He Won't Be Carrying More Than His Fair Share of the Load This Season", Sun-Sentinel.

Guy, Feeling

“A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Radio Address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15828 (26 October 1939) 1930s

“It was in old days, with our learned men, an interesting and oft-investigated question, "What is the origin of light?" and the solution of it has been repeatedly attempted, with no other result than to crowd our lunatic asylums with the would-be solvers. Hence, after fruitless attempts to suppress such investigations indirectly by making them liable to a heavy tax, the Legislature, in comparatively recent times, absolutely prohibited them.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 2. Of the Climate and Houses in Flatland

Men, Question, Light, Time

“Mathematics, from the earliest times to which the history of human reason can reach, has followed, among that wonderful people of the Greeks, the safe way of science. But it must not be supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as for logic, in which reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to make for itself that royal road. I believe, on the contrary, that there was a long period of tentative work (chiefly still among the Egyptians), and that the change is to be ascribed to a revolution, produced by the happy thought of a single man, whose experiments pointed unmistakably to the path that had to be followed, and opened and traced out for the most distant times the safe way of a science. The history of that intellectual revolution, which was far more important than the passage round the celebrated Cape of Good Hope, and the name of its fortunate author, have not been preserved to us. … A new light flashed on the first man who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle (whether his name was Thales or any other name), for he found that he had not to investigate what he saw hi the figure, or the mere concepts of that figure, and thus to learn its properties; but that he had to produce (by construction) what he had himself, according to concepts a priori, placed into that figure and represented in it, so that, in order to know anything with certainty a priori, he must not attribute to that figure anything beyond what necessarily follows from what he has himself placed into it, in accordance with the concept.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to the Second Edition [Tr. F. Max Müller], (New York, 1900), p. 690; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz, Memorabilia mathematica or, The philomath's quotation-book https://openlibrary.org/books/OL14022383M/Memorabilia_mathematica, Published 1914. p. 10 Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Happiness, People, Hope, Way

“We are very anxious to learn the condition of Lord Howe's fleet. The French seventy-four that has got into Boston had an engagement with a British sixty-four. The Captain and Lieutenant of the former were both wounded; one lost a leg, the other an arm.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

“All we really need to do is learn 'em so they don't frig up the cash register or offend the customers.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter Three, Is our Schools Sucking?, p. 90

“Without the aid of these, then, it is not possible to deal accurately with the forms of being nor to discover the truth in things, knowledge of which is wisdom, and evidently not even to philosophize properly, for "just as painting contributes to the menial arts toward correctness of theory, so in truth lines, numbers, harmonic intervals, and the revolutions of circles bear aid to the learning of the doctrines of wisdom," says the Pythagorean Androcydes. Likewise Archytas of Tarentum, at the beginning of… On Harmony, says… in about these words: "It seems to me that they do well to study mathematics, and it is not at all strange that they have correct knowledge about each thing, what it is. For if they knew rightly the nature of the whole, they were also likely to see well what is the nature of the parts. About geometry, indeed, and arithmetic and astronomy, they have handed down to us a clear understanding, and not least also about music. For these seem to be sister sciences; for they deal with sister subjects, the first two forms of being."”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

Wisdom, Truth, Art, Music

“With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;—he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Books

“You must learn to live within yourself … You must establish the values by which you live. You must first recognize the need, and if it is right you will be amazed at how things will open up.”

Cary Grant (1904–1986) British-American film and stage actor

Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

“By the year 2000 we should be able to say that we have learned to live securely, in peace and mutual prosperity among our Asian and Pacific neighbours. We will not be cut off from our British and European cultures and traditions or from those economies. On the contrary, the more engaged we are economically and politically with the region around us, the more value and relevance we bring to those old relationships. Far from putting our identity at risk, our relationships with the region will energise it.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

Election campaign launch, February 14, 1996.

Peace

“The language of the chalk is not hard to learn, not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell; and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

“And as our friendship grew, and I learned more about Barack, he introduced me to the work he'd done when he first moved to Chicago after college. Instead of heading to Wall Street, Barack had gone to work in neighborhoods devastated when steel plants shut down and jobs dried up. And he'd been invited back to speak to people from those neighborhoods about how to rebuild their community.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2000s, Democratic National Convention speech (2008)

Friendship, People, Communication

“No words used in the Gospels can legitimately be twisted to mean unending punishment, and indeed, such an expression is self-contradictory. The main motive of punishment surely is to reform the sufferer; in school, to make a better scholar; in the State, to make a better citizen. If the punishment goes on forever when does the sufferer benefit by the punishment or use the lesson he has learned so painfully? If Hell were endless it would be valueless.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.286

School, Motivation, Hell, Suffering

“With your spirit open and unconstricted, look at things from a high point of view. You must cultivate your wisdom and spirit. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realised the wisdom of strategy.
The wisdom of strategy is different from other things. On the battlefield, even when you are hard-pressed, you should ceaselessly research the principles of strategy so that you can develop a steady spirit.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Wisdom, Men, Justice, Art

“Crippled but free, I was blind all the time I was learning to see.”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"Help on the Way"
Song lyrics, (1975)

Time

“Indeed, we are face to face with a strange kind of Sikhism. The Sikh Gurus had worked and fought for the resurgence of Hinduism but now we are told that this resurgence is precisely the cause of Sikh uneasiness. Guru Govind Singh started sending Sikh Gyanis to Varanasi to learn Sanskrit and to study the Epics, the Puranas and other classics to understand the Adi Granth itself, but the neo-Akali ideologues find Sanskrit and these classics objectionable. Maharaja Ranjit Singh banned cow-killing in his kingdom and a hundred Sikhs were blown to smithereens by the British because they stood for cow-protection, but now it is an anathema to secularist Akali scholars. The fact is that it is not the old Sikhism of the Gurus but a new version of it which has been taking shape under the impact of very different ideological and political forces that we are meeting. This neo-Akalism is a child of self-alienation and spiritual illiteracy and it, is at odd not only with Hinduism but for that very reason with Sikhism itself.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from the preface by Ram Swarup in Gurbachan, S. T. S., & Swarup, R. (1991). Muslim League attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947.

Understanding, Study

“Capital markets reward you for what you learn that other people have yet to ascertain.”

Kenneth Griffin (1968) American hedge fund manager

Bloomberg News (April 29, 2005) http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nifea&&sid=asibq1F2VEMk.

People

“The fact is those root-truths on which the foundations of our being rest, are apprehended not logically at all, but mystically. This faculty of spiritual apprehension, which is a very different one from those which are trained in schools and colleges, must be educated and fed, not less, but more carefully than our lower faculties, else it will be starved and die, however learned and able in other respects we may become.”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 563.

Truth, Education, School, Training

“Those responding to Geller's phenomenon by "bending forks" themselves, were following the same pattern. their ego "roof-brain" had nothing to do with it (and they also hadn't yet learned fully enough that the act was impossible).”

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926–2016) American writer

Source: Exploring the Crack In the Cosmic Egg (1974), p. 38

“(…) To take the world as real and one’s self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy. It is all very simple. Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought ‘I am’ is the polishing cloth. Use it.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.29.

World, Peace, Imagination, Reality

“HOW TO LEARN ANYTHINGAs far as I can tell these are the techniques used by bright people who want to learn something other than by taking courses in it. […]1. DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN. But you can't know this exactly, because you don't know exactly how any field is structured until you know all about it.2. READ EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON IT, especially what you enjoy, since that way you can read more of it and faster.3. GRAB FOR INSIGHTS. Regardless of points others are trying to make, when you recognize an insight that has meaning for you, make it your own […] Its importance is not how central it is, but how clear and interesting and memorable to you. REMEMBER IT. Then go for another.4. TIE INSIGHTS TOGETHER. Soon you will have your own string of insights in a field. […]5. CONCENTRATE ON MAGAZINES, NOT BOOKS. Magazines have far more insights per inch of text, and can be read much faster. But when a book really speaks to you, lavish attention on it.6. FIND YOUR OWN SPECIAL TOPICS, AND PURSUE THEM.7. GO TO CONVENTIONS. For some reason, conventions are a splendid concentrated way to learn things; talking to people helps. […]8. "FIND YOUR MAN." Somewhere in the world is someone who will answer your questions extraordinarily well. If you find him, dog him. […]9. KEEP IMPROVING YOUR QUESTIONS. Probably in your head there are questions that don't seem to line up with what your hearing. Don't assume that you don't understand; keep adjusting the questions till you get an answer that relates to what you wanted.10. YOUR FIELD IS BOUNDED WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE. Just because others group and stereotype things in conventional ways does not mean they are necessarily right. Intellectual subjects are connected every which way; your field is what you think it is. […]”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Dream Machines
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

People, Books, World, Dogs

“If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A. D., and besides telescopes are unnatural.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

"The Seven Tongues of God"
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)

Life, Religion, Study

“The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Preface To The first edition, p. ix
The Political Economy Of Growth (1957)

Hope, Intelligence

“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

God, Perfection

“It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Preface To The 2011 edition, p. xi
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

Lie, Behavior, Understanding, Nature

“I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

Quoted in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman (McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 1996).

People, World, Hope, Error

“No coach ever stops learning. That's what makes the great coaches great. They strive to learn more every day and they never stop asking questions.”

Tom Crean (basketball coach) (1966) American college basketball coach

Foreword to Winning Basketball : Techniques and Drills for Playing Better Offensive Basketball (2004) by Ralph L. Pim

Question

“Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea, and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Source: The Light's On At Signpost (2002), p. xx.

Way, Idea, Change

“Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution.”

Charles Mingus (1922–1979) American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader

As quoted in More Than A Fakebook : The Music Of Charles Mingus (1991) by Andrew Homzy

God, People, Error, Thinking

“It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had been presumably fleeing and were shot from behind.”

John Rabe (1882–1950) German businessman

13 December 1937 diary per Woods, John E. (1998). The Good Man of Nanjing: the Diaries of John Rabe. p. 67.

People

“If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Idea, Birth, Time, Waiting

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. … Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”

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

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 4: Camping Among the Tombs, page 140

Life, Death, Children, Beauty

“Leave well — even 'pretty well' — alone: that is what I learn as I get old.”

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) English poet and writer

As quoted in Fitzgerald to His Friends: Selected Letters of Edward FitzGerald (1979) edited by Alethea Hayter, p. 178.

“We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1942) " The Practice of The Love of God http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/wpl1942a.html", William Penn Lecture, delivered at Arch Street Meetinghouse, Philadelphia, 1942. In: Friends' Intelligencer, Vol. 99 p. 231-261 1940s

Love, Life, World, School

“The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

“[Director Christopher] Nolan … gives us enough multilayered subplots to at least fool us into thinking this is a work of intellectual and moral complexity. But as a piece of visual storytelling, from shot to shot, The Dark Knight is a mess. Characters disappear from one locale and show up inexplicably in another, thanks to the magic of editing. At one point, we learn two characters have been abducted, but Nolan doesn't bother to show us who did it or how. (Later, he explains the "who did it" with dialogue -- the lazy way.) At the end, a major character is left hanging, literally, as we are figuratively. If this is genius, give me hackery.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight/index.html of The Dark Knight (2008)

Fools, Way, Thinking

“[T]he establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, On Some Counter-Arguments (October 2017)

Imagination, Victory

“Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Panda's Thumb of Technology", p. 65
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

History, Change

“I learned that Cézanne's success was not preventing the Neo-Impressionists from getting support. My knowledge of their technique was entirely literary.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Support, Knowledge, Success

“Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past. Advances in science will also bring higher standards of living, will lead to the prevention or cure of diseases, will promote conservation of our limited national resources, and will assure means of defense against aggression. But to achieve these objectives — to secure a high level of employment, to maintain a position of world leadership — the flow of new scientific knowledge must be both continuous and substantial.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

Source: Science - The Endless Frontier (1945), Ch. 1 "Introduction"

Age, World, Disease, Knowledge

“He adapted the words to the capacity of the Germans, often at the expense of accuracy. He cared more for the substance than the form. He turned the Hebrew shekel into a Silberling, He used popular alliterative phrases as Geld und Gut, Land und Leute, Rath und That, Stecken und Stab, Dornen und Disteln, matt und müde, gäng und gäbe. He avoided foreign terms which rushed in like a flood with the revival of learning, especially in proper names (as Melanchthon for Schwarzerd, Aurifaber for Goldschmid, Oecolampadius for Hausschein, Camerarius for Kammermeister). He enriched the vocabulary with such beautiful words as holdselig, Gottseligkeit.
Erasmus Alber, a contemporary of Luther, called him the German Cicero, who not only reformed religion, but also the German language.
Luther's version is an idiomatic reproduction of the Bible in the very spirit of the Bible. It brings out the whole wealth, force, and beauty of the German language. It is the first German classic, as King James's version is the first English classic. It anticipated the golden age of German literature as represented by Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,—all of them Protestants, and more or less indebted to the Luther-Bible for their style. The best authority in Teutonic philology pronounces his language to be the foundation of the new High German dialect on account of its purity and influence, and the Protestant dialect on account of its freedom which conquered even Roman Catholic authors.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Notable examples of Luther's renderings of Hebrew and Greek words

Age, Religion, Beauty, Literature

“We're going to move a lot of crude (oil) in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

http://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/buffett:-moving-oil-by-rail-safely-is-a-major-industry-concern-279336 "Buffett: Moving Oil By Rail Safely Is A Major Industry Concern" Investing.com (24 April 2014)
Quotes from the press

Country

“When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially anything respecting the free states, was an additional weight to the almost intolerable burden of my thought, 'I am a slave for life'. To my bondage I could see no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 102–103.

Life, Knowledge, Reality, Reading

“While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together….”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. XIV, ch. 12
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Life, Happiness, Truth, World

“I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

At the Neo-Pagan Starwood Festival (July 1991), recorded on Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) http://www.freetimes.com/story/3493 by the Association for Consciousness Exploration ISBN 1-59157-002-6

“A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight.
Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man’s relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Truth, World, Hope, History

“The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will.Washington still hasn’t learned this. American hubris can lead the administration and Congress into a bailout solution that the rest of the world, which has to finance it, might not accept.”

Paul Craig Roberts (1939) American economist

"The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation," http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09242008.html CounterPunch (2008-09-24)

World, Dependency, Country

““And do not think,” Manisfree said, “that we absolve ourselves from blame in this situation. Although we teachers purport to know more than other men, we have usually chosen to remain aloof from public life. Practical, hardheaded men of the world have always frightened us; and those men, in their hardheaded way, have brought us to this.”
“Nor is aloofness our only failure,” said Hanley of Anthropology. “Let me point out that we have taught—badly! Our few promising students became teachers, thus insulating themselves as we had. The rest of our students sat through the sleep-provoking drone of our lectures, eager only to depart and take their places in a mad world. We did not touch them, Joenes, we did not move them, and we did not teach them to think.”
“In fact,” said Blake of Physics, “we did quite the contrary. We managed to equip most of our students with a definite hatred of thinking. They learned to view culture with the greatest suspicion, to ignore ethics, and to consider the sciences solely as a means of making money. This was our responsibility and our failure. The outcome of that failure is the world.””

Robert Sheckley book Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Source: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 9 “The Need for the Utopia” (p. 74)

Life, Men, Money, World

“I wish as sincerely as any man, that learned men may have all the encouragements, and all the advantages that are consistent with the general right and good of mankind.”

Joseph Yates (judge) (1722–1770) English barrister and judge

4 Burr. Part IV., 2394.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)

Men, Sincerity

“Laying here in the dark you're like an angel on my chest,
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness.
Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see?
Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be.
And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest,
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets.
We swore forever friends on the backstreets until the end,
Hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Backstreets"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Angels, Tear, Time, Heart

“The term ‘kinship’ correctly suggests the existence not only of contemporary relatives but also of ancestors. Indeed, the recent discussion of dynamic capability was prefigured historically, with a variety of terminology, in a number of sources. Perhaps the most directly relevant example among these earlier contributions is Schumpeter’s discussion of the ‘routinization of innovation’ (Schumpeter 1950). Schumpeter’s argument presented, however, an issue that remains central in contemporary discussion of dynamic capability—the possibly problematic character of the claim that there is such a thing as ‘learned competence’ for doingnew things.”

Sidney G. Winter (1935) American economist

Dynamic Capability as a Source of Change, 2008

“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

God, Family, Feeling, Home

“I remember I stood stunned as a boy, in front of the paintings of the old [Dutch] masters in our museums, how they let speak Nature to you. If I have learned to see nature by someone, it was by our old masters. But most by Nature itself.”

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (1824–1903) Dutch painter of the Hague School (1824-1903)

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018 version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: Ik herinner me, dat ik als jongen in onze museums voor de schilderijen van de oude meesters verstomd stond, zoals ze de natuur tot je lieten spreken. Als ik van iemand geleerd heb de natuur te zien dan is het van onze oude meesters. Maar het meest van de natuur-zelve. in an interview with J.H. Rössing, at the end of his life, c. 1902; as cited in Eind goed Al goed, de carriere van J.H. Weissenbruch https://www.artsalonholland.nl/grote-meesters-kunstgeschiedenis/johan-hendrik-weissenbruch-haagse-school, by Sander Kletter

Boy, Nature, Painting

“In opening and conquering a country great and wild and rich - a country indeed not yet fully known or conquered - we have still to learn more about ourselves and each other.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address to the Canadian Club of Ottawa, December 18, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Country

“Firstly I had never touched anyone's feet. So I refused to do that for months. I had never been inside a temple. I refused to go for puja every evening. I said I have only come to learn dance. I don't have to do all that. But the dance brought the devotion and the spiritual understanding. I saw my guru's devotion because everything he did was by example. If I have built Nrityagram today it is because of what I took from him.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

On her learning stages of the Odissi dance, quoted in "I have been a hippie all my life".

Understanding, Dance

“I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handlebar—with deadeye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door. In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Confidence, Light

“You want to win in politics? Stop wasting time being dragged screaming out of hearings and learn to f'ing organize. Signed, Reality.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

Twitter post https://twitter.com/murphymike/status/1038557357289033728 (8 September 2018) 2010s, 2018

Reality, Time

“Jesus himself could not perform miracles where the people had not faith beforehand, and when sensible men, the learned and rulers of those times, demanded of him a miracle which could be submitted to examination, he, instead of granting the request, began to upbraid them; so that no man of this stamp could believe in him. It was not until thirty to sixty years after the death of Jesus, that people began to write an account of the performance of these miracles, in a language which the Jews in Palestine did not understand. And this was at a time when the Jewish nation was in a state of the greatest disquietude and confusion, and when very few of those who had known Jesus were still alive. Nothing then was easier for them than to invent as many miracles as they pleased, without fear of their writings being readily understood or refuted. It had been impressed upon all converts from the beginning that it was both advantageous and soul-saving to believe, and to put the mind captive under the obedience of faith; and consequently there was as much credulity among them as there was "pia fraud" or "deception from good motives" among their teachers; and both of these, as is well known, prevailed in the highest degree in the early Christian church.”

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) German philosopher

Source: Fragments from Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament, pp. 73–74

Death, Men, People, Fear