Quotes about learning
page 51

“The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

Lee Atwater (1951–1991) American political consultant and strategist

Source: Interview in Life (January 1991)

Truth, Family, Feeling, Soul

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) Irish classicist and polymathic scholar

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children, Intelligence, Question, Freedom

“One demand for a concept of need arises because the concept of demand itself has serious weaknesses and limitations. It assumes away, for instance, a serious epistemological problem. The very idea of autonomous choice implies first that the chooser knows the real alternatives which are open to him, and second that he makes the choice according to value criteria or a utility function which he will not later regret. Both the image of the field of choice and the utility function have a learning problem which, by and large, economists have neglected. This problem is particularly acute in the case of medical care, where the demander is usually a layman faced with professional suppliers who know very much more than he does. The demand for medical care, indeed, is primarily a demand for knowledge or at least the results of knowledge…”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1967) "The Concept of Need for Health Services" as cited in: Gregory Parston (1980) Planners, Politics, and Health Services. p. 99
1960s

Idea, Knowledge, Problem

“It is unbecoming to a soldier, all this book-learning.”

Michael Shaara book The Killer Angels

George Pickett, Part I, CH 4: Longstreet, p. 53
The Killer Angels (1974)

Books

“Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?”

Robert A. Heinlein book Farmer in the Sky

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 14, “Land of My Own” (p. 142)

Men

“I commenced the study of the Chinese language at the University of Munich. I had then about 3 years in Germany, engaged in various studies. Happening to notice the announcement of a course of lectures on the language of the Chinese by Professor Neumman, the interest I have always taken in the people, induced me to employ an otherwise vacant hour in learning something of their tongue.”

Thomas Taylor Meadows (1815–1868) British sinologist and diplomatic interpreter from Chinese

Page 7 of "The Chinese and their Rebellions, viewed in connection with their national philosophy, ethics, legislation and administration, to which is added An Essay on Civilization and its present state in the East and West" https://books.google.com/books?id=dKEBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR3&dq=The+Chinese+and+their+Rebellions,+viewed+in+connection+with+their+national+philosophy,+ethics,+legislation+and+administration,+to+which+is+added+An+Essay+on+Civilization+and+its+present+state+in+the+East+and+West&hl=en&sa=X&ei=x626UaDJKsnWyQHLmoG4BA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Chinese%20and%20their%20Rebellions%2C%20viewed%20in%20connection%20with%20their%20national%20philosophy%2C%20ethics%2C%20legislation%20and%20administration%2C%20to%20which%20is%20added%20An%20Essay%20on%20Civilization%20and%20its%20present%20state%20in%20the%20East%20and%20West&f=false

People, Study, Universe

“Preflight planners wanted us to stay in TV range so that they could learn from our results how they could best plan for future missions. I candidly admit that I knowingly and deliberately left the planned working area out of TV coverage to examine and photograph the interior crater walls for possible bedrock exposure or other useful information.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Letter to Robert Krulwich (2010)

Future

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do — and they don’t. They have prejudices.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Thinking, Teachers

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

II, 7
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

Time

“Watts published a luminous book entitled The Wisdom of Insecurity that ought to be required reading for every high school senior. Watts elaborates beautifully on what I've learned from observation and personal experience: namely, that security is an illusion.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

Wisdom, Books, School, Reading

“Economics as currently learned and taught in graduate school and practiced afterward is more theory-intensive and less observation-intensive than perhaps any other science. I think the statement that "no mere fact ever was a match in economics for a consistent theory" accurately describes the prevailing attitude in the profession”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Milgrom and Roberts, 1987, p. 185
Source: "Theory, experiment and economics," 1989, p. 151.

School, Thinking, Science

“The spirit of the Knowledge Society is the spirit of Pluralism—a readiness to accept the Other, indeed to learn from him, to see difference as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the 2006 Convocation of the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan (2 December 2006)]

Knowledge

“Titles or awards are not the mark of your success. They are the beginning of a life-long sadhana. Learning should never stop. Discipline of riyaz is a must if you are serious about pursuing an art.”

Shreya Ghoshal (1984) Indian playback singer

TRP of programs http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/queen-of-charts/article5100604.ece

Life, Art, Success

“Multimodal presentations have an inherent critical potential to the extent that we learn how to use the images to deconstruct the viewpoint of the text, and the text to subvert the naturalness of the image.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Lemke, J. (2005). "Towards critical multimedia literacy: Technology, research, and politics." In McKenna, M., Reinking, D., Labbo, L. & Kieffer, R. (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum (LEA Publishing). p. 4

Nature

“We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters, that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules, and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square. We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean, and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.”

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

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

People, Truth, School, Teachers

“Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
That's a' the learning I desire.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

First Epistle to J. Lapraik, st. 13 (1786)

Nature

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to 2nd edition, Tr. F. Max Müller (1905)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Happiness, Law, Question, Nature

“What comfort there is in a cheerful spirit! how the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper, and a heart which either naturally, or, what is better, from conscientious principle, has learned to take all things on their bright side, believing that the Giver of life being all-perfect Love, the best offering we can make to Him is to enjoy to the full what He sends of good, and bear what He allows of evil!”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10

Love, Life, Nature, Evil

“The goal of mankind is knowledge.... Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man "knows," should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what man "learns" is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Soul, Knowledge

“When you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

As quoted in Fortune (February 17, 2016), "Bernie Sanders Was Right: Denmark Is the Best Nation for Working People" http://fortune.com/2016/02/17/denmark-workplace-benefits/ 2010s, 2016

People, Health, World, Family

“It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies, seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; CCLXXXVI
Lacon (1820)

“In arguing too, the parson owned his skill,
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still;
While words of learned length, and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.”

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village

Source: The Deserted Village (1770), Line 211.

“The only sure mode of acquiring sound ideas of our relation to the Creator is to begin with the study of ourselves, and to view God as a Father and Friend, dealing with us in precisely the same way as we would deal with others over whom we exercise authority. Conscience, that infallible Mentor "that sticketh closer than a brother," tells us that we are responsible beings; and in the domestic, as well as the social circle, we speedily feel the discipline and learn the lesson of rewards and punishments. The law written in man's heart points to the past as pregnant with events which may affect the future; and in the earnestness of his aspirations, and the activity of his search, he is gradually led to the mysterious history of his race. He learns that on tables of stone have been engraven the same law to which his heart responded; -that when all were dead, one died for all; and in the contemplation of the great sacrifice, he obtains a solution of the interesting problem of his individual destiny. The Sacred record which is now his guide, speaks to him of fore-knowledge and predestination, while, in perfect consistency, it records the ministration of descending spirits, and the holier communings of God with man. The Divine decrees no longer perplex him. They transcend, indeed, his Reason - but that Reason, the faithful interpreter of Conscience, does not falter in proclaiming the Freedom of his Will, and the Responsibility of his Actions.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Review of Vestiges (1845)

God, Faith, Law, Way

“Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, that we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering: To produce the philosopher's stone - to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That's the goal - to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life that enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge of out alchemy. The question is, what were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind's pathology.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life, Truth, Dreams, Way

“There was no day like the Day of al-Husayn, when thirty thousand men advanced against him (while) they claimed that they belonged to this community, and that they (wanted) to seek proximity to Allah, the Great and Almighty, through (shedding) his blood. He (al-Husayn) reminded them of Allah, but they did not learn (from him) till they killed him out of (their) oppression and aggression.”

Ali Zayn al-Abidin (659–713) Great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.9, p. 147.

Men, Communication

“On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational — to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

Thinking

“As years went by the boy grew high
And the village looked on in awe
They’d never seen anything like
The boy with the moon and star before
And people would ride from far and wide
just to seek the word he spread
"I'll tell you everything I've learned,"
And "Love", is all he said.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Boy With A Moon And Star On His Head
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Love, People, Star, Boy

“Let us see to it that in our schools, as far as possible, every week, some lessons from Scripture, in the language of the Scripture are learned.”

Wayland Hoyt (1838–1910) American Baptist Minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 572.

School

“Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLI (p. 204)

Star

“Without quality in life, there is only Death waiting at the end for all of us, like the bird. Being one of those fortunate men whose existence burns more brightly because of gunning grouse, I have learned that the place to look for quality is within yourself.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Life, Death, Men, Bird

“Now that you've grown up
You can finally learn to be a child
We made it to the end of the world
But we'll never make it out alive.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Skin Thin.
Song lyrics, White Lies for Dark Times (2009)

World

“It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. […] Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make it seem harder to learn because of the many properties it suggests for exploration.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

§5.2
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

“"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I learn." There is no evidence that Franklin said this. Scholars believe the saying comes from the Xunzi.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Additional information may be read at the following websites:
http://dakinburdick.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/tell-me-and-i-forget/
http://www.quora.com/History/Where-and-when-did-Benjamin-Franklin-say-Tell-me-and-I-forget-teach-me-and-I-may-remember-involve-me-and-I-learn
http://gazettextra.com/weblogs/word-badger/2013/mar/24/whose-quote-really/
Misattributed

Forgetting

“Is this love big enough to watch over me?
Big enough to let go of me
Without hurting me,
Like the day I learned to swim?”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

Love, Hurt

“Dear friends, not so much, was Turk Telekom a Turkish company in 2002? It was the Turk. Did you sell this company in the Arabs? Did you sell Telsim to the British, Akbank to the Kuwait, Kusadasi Harbor to the Israel, vehicle inspection job to the Germany, İzmir harbor to the Hong Kong, Avea and MNG to the Lebanon, TGRT to the a American, Süper FM to the Canada? You did sell. Not very much, in 2002 these companies were owner Turk. It belonged to the Turks. Now these companies are all in the hands of strangers. Do you know how many factory, shipyard, facility, port, land, building you sell privatized in your seven year rule? I learned one by one from the Privatization Administration. 721 pieces. You sold like father's goods. Do you have one new factory, one?”

Muharrem İnce (1964) Turkish politician

Source: TBMM B:42 25.12.200 9 0: 2 http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/tutanaklar/TUTANAK/TBMM/d23/c058/b042/tbmm230580420075.pdf

“What I mean by the "pursuit of learning" is not the ability to read classical texts and study ancient history, but to be fully acquainted with conditions all over the world and to have a keen awareness of what is going on abroad and around us. Now from what I can see world trends and conditions are still unsettled, and as long as they remain unsettled there is still a chance that something can be done. First, therefore, we must rectify conditions in our own domain, after which conditions in other domains can be rectified. This having been done, conditions at court can be rectified and finally conditions throughout the whole world can be rectified. First one must set an example oneself and then it can be extended progressively to others. This is what I mean by the "pursuit of learning."”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IV.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

World, History, Study, Chance

“Tagore once said– art has to be beautiful, but, before that, it has to be truthful.
Now, what is truth? There is no eternal truth. Every artist has to learn private truth though a painful private process. And that is what he has to convey.”

Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) Bengali filmmaker and script writer

[Ghatak, Ritwik, Cinema and I, 1987, Ritwik Memorial Trust, 75]

Pain, Truth, Beauty, Art

“When you learn to make everybody happy, you will possess the golden secret of how to milk the contented voters. But do it in such a way that they won’t think you want them to vote for you just because you need the money.
They need the money, and besides, they can think up other reasons if they try.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 6 : How not to offend anybody

Money, Happiness, Secret, Way

“The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Minus 24x http://www.monochrom.at/minus24x/index-eng.htm, 2001

Life, Age, Speed

“Over the last decade, media were taken over by people who think that their ideals, opinions and way of life are superior to others and so they have the mission to tell others how to live, what to think and what to do. Those people have learned that there is a very easy way of manipulating others with guilt and fake goodwill. They will tell you that you should be ashamed, because you are privileged. You are white, you are healthy, you are rich and it's your fault that there are others who are not as lucky as you. So you must redeem those crimes by doing what those social justice warriors think will please those who are not privileged enough. And if you don't, they will jump on you and give you a hard time. Nobody wants to be called sexist, misogynistic, rape culture supporter, and everybody kind of agrees that it's great to help people who were not as lucky as them, so for some time this works. The problem is that this is not enough. At the same time, these people persuade those that are not so lucky that they are victims. They make enemies out of people. They ostracize different opinions.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

Daniel Vavra GamerGate Interview http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/gamergate-interviews/12400-Daniel-Vavra-GamerGate-Interview (October 10, 2014)

Life, People, Justice, Way

“The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics, Knowledge

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Wisdom, God

“That learning process has been likened to the challenge of having someone open a fire hydrant and expect you to swallow it all.”

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

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 94

“Ours is an industrial civilization, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey's theories of ‘learning through doing’ and of ‘education as life adjustment,’ and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Knowledge and Understanding", in Vedanta and the West (May-June 1956); later in Collected Essays (1958)

Life, People, World, Education

“The History of Institutions cannot be mastered – can scarcely be approached – without an effort. It affords little of the romantic incident or of the picturesque grouping which constitute the charm of History in general, and holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth. But it…abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.”

William Stubbs (1825–1901) English historian and clergyman

The Constitutional History of England (1873-8; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903) vol. 1, p. iii.

Life, Truth, Lie, History

“After midlife, one falls back on C G Jung and determines that the first years of life were in themselves symbolic.
To learn a profession (calling) doesn't mean that you are called. To obtain money doesn't mean that you are rich. To marry doesn't mean that you have learned to love. To build a house doesn't mean that you are at home.
All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

Wort des Heils, Wort der Heilung. II p 148 (1989)

Love, Life, Money, Home

“As that little child in the spacesuit in The Seven year Itch grew up, three things would become obvious to him. He would be aware that he hadn’t been trained to really understand the history of mechanization, and was insufficient in that regard; that he hadn’t been trained to be anything like Winston Churchill, and was going to be permanently insufficient in that regard; and that he wasn’t actually going to be able to look a mine worker in the eye, and was going to be insufficient in that regard. He was going to be aware that he had been a Video Ranger from the start, and that he was going to have to keep on being a Video Ranger, and that he was going to have to learn to laugh about that. And, also, because he wanted to get married, to be a man in some sense, he was going to have to be serious about something. He was going to have to touch base with some real thing going on in his father, and what he got hold of was the irony in his father…. And the evolution of that process is toward David Letterman…. We were going to have to grow up to be entirely ironic in our visceral reactions to our own manhood.”

George W. S. Trow (1943–2006) American writer

My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999)

History, Understanding, Sense, Training

“If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Autonomy"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Nature

“I do not believe that I have a thinking problem as much as a feeling problem. What I mean is, I know the Christian answer to most questions but I do not always live accordingly. I am not pagan. But my "goodness" is the product of moral upbringing, not of a coherent biblical worldview. I tend do to and thing as I feel like doing and thinking. There is rarely an exception. I am guided by Pavlovian instincts. Church culture has a vocabulary, and I have learned it well. There is a dress code too, and my clothes are well within the acceptable parameters, I wear Dockers and plaid shirts, as is silently required of twenty-something Christians. I only vote Republican, which is also silently required.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Feeling, Question, Problem, Thinking

“And what did ye look they should compass?
Warcraft learned in a breath,
Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?
So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?
How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?
But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”
And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:
And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,
Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Islanders http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/islanders.html, l. 22-31 (1902). Other works

Death, Men, Dogs, Fools

“We often hear people indignantly asking others, “Don’t you know who I am?” But if, instead, we could just ask ourselves, “Do I know who I am?” and perform sincere self-inquiry, we could find a permanent solution to all of life’s problems. Tragically, our approach to education is lopsided. We spend our entire lives trying to learn everything about the external world and the lives of other people, yet we never try to learn about ourselves, the inner world.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Amritanandamayi's Address Upon Receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the State University of New York (2010)

Life, People, World, Education

“People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

As quoted in "Rumpole creator Mortimer dies at 85" by Sam Marsden and Chris Moncrieff, The Independent (16 January 2009)

People, Thinking, Personality

“The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

On Writing (2002)

Art

“Science is unreasonably effective, it's generated knowledge beyond all expectation. It's also delivered perspective. Yes, we are an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, but we're also rare. And because we're rare, we're valuable. So what are we to do to secure our future? Well, we must learn to value the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, and not just because it grows our economy or allows us to build better bombs. We must also learn to value the human race and take responsibility for our own survival. Why? Because there's nobody else out there to value us or to look after us. And finally, most important of all, we must educate the next generation in the great discoveries of science and we must teach them to use the light of reason to banish the darkness of superstition, because if we do that, then at least there's a chance that this universe will remain a human one.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Human Universe, episode 5

Education, Knowledge, Light, Universe

“The physicians in Celle were fifteen years behind in their practice; they had heard of a new style of practice, but regarded it as a mere chimera. When I ventured to say a word or two, they did not understand me: when I appealed to some great authority, they were ignorant of it: when I spoke from my own practical experience, they looked at me, from head to foot, and said sneeringly, "Well, well; experience will come in time." But when by chance I ventured to make some proposal, they turned round, and wondered where they should find room enough in the churchyards to bury my patients. The great applause with which my Dissertations had been received in all the learned journals, even in England as well as in France, gave me courage, hoping that this circumstance would make some impression on the mind of the public; but it was generally thought I had ill employed my time, and knew little or nothing. Being obliged to frequent society, I was so disgusted with the general tone and the topics of their conversation, that I was almost in despair; at last, some young ladies treated me with more attention.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Hope, Courage, Understanding, Chance

“It took me decades to appreciate the depth and true value of Yoga. Sacred texts supported my discoveries, but it was not that signposted the way. What I learned through yoga, I found out through yoga. I am not however, a “ self made man”. I am only what seventy-two years of devoted yoga sadhana has created out of me. Any contribution I have made to the world has been the fruit of my sadhana.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x

World, Way, Support

“Learn, compare, collect the facts!”

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) Russian physiologist

Bequest to the Academic Youth of Soviet Russia.

“This situation can happen to anyone. If you learn Wing Chun you can cope with it better than someone that doesn't know Wing Chun.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung's Answer on the Question of "If you trip and end up on the floor, can you still apply the principles of Wing Chun?" Ground Fighting Source: Interview with Wong Shun Leung, by: Daniel Poon, Qi Magazine http://www.vingtsunupdate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=76

““What course of action do you favor?”
“Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants—they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.””

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

“Methuselah’s Children” Part 1, Chapter 1, p. 539
Short fiction, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)

War, Past

“There is a kind of synergy between the different forms of work, you’ll learn things from one sort of work that will have tremendous application in another. They all tend to pull each other forward.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Radio excerpt presented by Voice of America (17 January 2010) http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/margaret-mead-1901-1978-one-of-the-most-famous-anthropologists-in-the-world-124869344/112571.html 2000s

Knowledge, Science

“Lick the alphabet. It makes you appear creative, it's an easy diagram to remember, it's like "aaaaa…. beeeee…. ceeee." She's thinking you're from fuckin' Europe or somethin: "OH GOD, WHERE'D YOU LEARN THAT, OHHH," and you're going "A, B, C, D, E, F, G".”

Sam Kinison (1953–1992) American comedian

HBO Special (1985)

God, Thinking, Appearance

“Auto-suggestion is disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming autosuggestion as my discovery. Far from it, auto-suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter I. The reality of auto-suggestion.

Appearance

“It’s very difficult to make them understand the importance of a Guruji. In India, it’s kind of more than gods and goddesses. We revere our Gurujis more than our parents, more than our family members, more than gods and goddesses. But they’ll never understand. Never understand who a Guru is. There are so many differences. But when I am teaching at Rotterdam in Netherlands (He heads the World Music Department at the Rotterdam Music Conservatory), I tell each and every student-“keep your shoe out, you have to sit down. If you want to learn Indian music, you have to treat me- not like your teacher, not like your Guru, you treat me as a friend and we share our willing.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Guru-Shishya Parampara (tradition of Teacher and Student) and Modern world.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

God, World, Family, Music

“In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on the precisely opposite system.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Agonising
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

School, Art, Knowledge, Universe

“The critic asks me: 'So you are a Symbolist? I mean well and I would like to learn; why don't you explain Symbolism to me'.. I answer...'Well, my paintings probably speak Hebrew, which you do not understand, so there is no point in continuing the conversation.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 130: quote in 1898

Understanding, Painting

“Susie and I choose the vegetarian way of life because for us, there really is no other choice. We must evolve as a race and as a planet, and evolution includes learning and changing from our mistakes. We will never truly grow until we as a whole come to the realization that all beings on this Earth should be treated with love and respect.”

Corey Feldman (1971) American actor

"What’s Your Favorite Corey Feldman Movie?" https://www.peta.org/blog/whats-favorite-corey-feldman-movie/, PETA (July 15, 2008).

Love, Life, Way, Change

“Here, in this filthy stench of powder smoke, he felt at home. Other men learned how to plough fields or to shape wood, but Sharpe had learned how to use a musket or rifle, sword or bayonet, and how to turn an enemy's flank or assault a fortress.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe, p. 69
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Rifles (1988)

Men, Home

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Life Magazine (September 1986)

“It was said by a very learned Judge, Lord Macclesfield, towards the beginning of this century that the most effectual way of removing land marks would be by innovating on the rules of evidence; and so I say. I have been in this profession more than forty years, and have practised both in Courts of law and equity; and if it had fallen to my lot to form a system of jurisprudence, whether or not I should have thought it advisable to establish two different Courts with different jurisdictions, and governed by different rules, it is not necessary to say. But, influenced as I am by certain prejudices that have become inveterate with those who comply with the systems they found established, I find that in these Courts proceeding by different rules a certain combined system of jurisprudence has been framed most beneficial to the people of this country, and which I hope I may be indulged in supposing has never yet been equalled in any other country on earth. Our Courts of law only consider legal rights: our Courts of equity have other rules, by which they sometimes supersede those legal rules, and in so doing they act most beneficially for the subject. We all know that, if the Courts of law were to take into their consideration all the jurisdiction belonging to Courts of equity, many bad consequences would ensue. To mention only the single instance of legacies being left to women who may have married inadvertently: if a Court of law could entertain an action for a legacy, the husband would recover it, and the wife might be left destitute: but if it be necessary in such a case to go into equity, that Court will not suffer the husband alone to reap the fruits of the legacy given to the wife; for one of its rules is that he who asks equity must do equity, and in such a case they will compel the husband to make a provision for the wife before they will suffer him to get the money. I exemplify the propriety of keeping the jurisdictions and rules of the different Courts distinct by one out of a multitude of cases that might be adduced.... One of the rules of a Court of equity is that they cannot decree against the oath of the party himself on the evidence of one witness alone without other circumstances: but when the point is doubtful, they send it to be tried at law, directing that the answer of the party shall be read on the trial; so they may order that a party shall not set up a legal term on the trial, or that the plaintiff himself shall be examined; and when the issue comes from a Court of equity with any of these directions the Courts of law comply with the terms on which it is so directed to be tried. By these means the ends of justice are attained, without making any of the stubborn rules of law stoop to what is supposed to be the substantial justice of each particular case; and it is wiser so to act than to leave it to the Judges of the law to relax from those certain and established rules by which they are sworn to decide.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Bauerman v. Eadenius (1798), 7 T. R. 667.

Women, Money, People, Justice

“Mild paedophilia is bad. Violent paedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild paedophilia, go away and learn how to think. Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/494012589828218881 (), quoted in Lizzie Dearden, " Richard Dawkins tweets: 'Date rape is bad, stranger rape is worse' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-says-date-rape-is-bad-stranger-rape-is-worse-on-twitter-9634572.html", The Independent () Twitter

Thinking

“The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning.”

Gilbert Highet (1906–1978) British academic

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

Happiness, Education

“Learn by heart the forms to be found in nature, so that you can use them like the notes in a musical composition. That is what these forms are for. Nature is a marvelous chaos, and it is our job and our duty to bring order into that chaos and – to perfect it.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's lecture 'Drei Briefe an eine Malerin' ('Three letters to a Woman-painter'), New York and Boston, Spring 1948; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 214
1940s

Music, Nature, Heart, Perfection

“To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin, this old man had perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (1952), p. 6

Age

“A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows things and finds his knowledge to be very slight, or he knows but explains badly, or he is too severe and impatient because teaching bores him, or he is dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted: the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school system. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but it makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places ready-made and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary, and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. For boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Love, Men, Children, Age

“It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn a limp.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art – with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity. There are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. The closer I get to that time - those twenty minutes – the more intensely subjective I become – bit the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper, you become continuously more and more critical. There is no measure I can hold on..”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

Life, Lie, Art, Time

“Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death, and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them. The more I learned, the more I grew convinced of the opposite: the history of philosophy was indeed animated by the questions that drew us there”

Susan Neiman (1955) American academic

Evil in Modern Thought: An alternative history of philosophy (2002)

Life, Death, History, Question

“The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.”

Thomas Binkley (1931–1995) lutenist

"The work is not the performance", Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music. (1997). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198165404.

Age, Music

“Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. … Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way.”

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

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Men, Way, Study, Victory

“The one thing I think we learned this year is that the Democrats and the Republicans are completely worthless.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Last Laugh ‘05 (2005)

Thinking

“My father was a wrestler and though everyone liked music in the family, it was a taboo to even think of a musical career. I used to wrestle to keep him happy. When I was about nine years old, I started learning vocal music from Pandit Rajaram, secretly! At the age of fifteen, I heard the flute for the first time on Allahabad radio. It was as if I was being transported to heaven. The flautist was Pt. Bholanath and that was the major turning point in my life. Soon after, while I was still in my teens I got an offer to work as a staff artist on Cuttack radio in Odisha/ and I accepted. It was then that my father found out that I was a musician. It was a major shock for him.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Parents and Passion.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

Life, Happiness, Age, Family

“It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline. We are taught to obey our parents, as Jesus did, and about the sanctity of truth and life itself. We are warned against lying, cheating and stealing. We learn that we must respect the person and property of others, care for each other, live and work together in cooperation, show loyalty, patience, kindness and share what we have. The family teaches us about the importance of knowledge, education, hard work and effort. It teaches us about enjoying ourselves, having fun, keeping fit and healthy.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Opening address, Pacific Vision festival, Auckland, New Zealand (26 July 1999) http://www.minpac.govt.nz/resources/reference/pvdocs/opening/mara.php.

Life, Truth, Education, Family

“I am a sensitive person, so it is actually saddening to learn that these poverty-stricken families are most of the time mistreated or looked down upon. Help the poor, like how you would want to be helped if you were in their position.”

Hill Zaini (1987) Bruneian singer

Borneo Bulletin, 26 September 2009

Family, Time, Help, Personality

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay book Critical and Historical Essays

Critical and Historical Essays: Volume II (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), p. 180
On Milton (1825)

Men, People, Fools, Freedom

“If a human being is isolated from other humans for a month or more, and is confined to a small area geographically and a small range of activities, his interest in his surroundings and its minutiae increase radically…. Further, if a confined, isolated human is allowed brief contacts with other humans even without a shared language, he begins to find their presence comforting, and a pleasant relief from the "evenness" of his surroundings. If these humans controls his only sources of food as well as his sources of intraspecies stimulation, he mat adapt to their demands in subtle and not so subtle ways. He may, given time, learn their language, take on their beliefs, etc. When we catch a dolphin and put him alone in a small tank, we are imposing similar "solitary confinement" structures on him. Maybe we can thus capture his loyalty and his initiative.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.190-191; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.578-579

Food, Way, Time, Loyalty

“Happiest day of my life, was when the Defense Department took down its Mercator… I started learning how to make maps while on an Army payroll. So getting to see mine in the Pentagon, flanked by generals, is a little like being a prophet who is finally honored by his hometown.”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Robinson (1989) in Chicago Tribune; As cited in: Myrna Oliver (2004)

Life

“I was stunned to learn that there are CIA operatives inside some state governments. They are not in executive positions—in other words, not appointed by the governor—but are permanent state employees. Governors come and go, but they keep working—in legitimate jobs, but with dual identities. In Minnesota, this person was at a deputy commissioner level, fairly high up. […] Are they put there to spy? To see the direction that state government is going, what's happening, and report back—to whom? And for what purpose? Do they think there are traitors in certain states? I don't know. That part, I wasn't told. I'm left to wonder why our Constitution is being violated.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 5 (p. 93)

Thinking, Parting, Personality

“Oh. Marx's love for Shakespeare! It is well known. Chris Hani shared the same passion. I have just learned this and I like the idea. Even though Marx more often quotes Timon of Athens, the Manifesto seems to evoke or convoke, right from the start, the first coming of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit that does not answer, on those ramparts of Elsinore which is then the old Europe.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

Love, Quotes, Idea, Passion

“An officer corps, my West Point education emphasized, must have a code of ethics that tolerates no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no immorality, no killing other than that recognized under international rules of war and essential for military victory. Yet I also learned to my chagrin that there are those who fail the standards and that the code must be constantly policed. I saw failures at West Point, and for all my preventive efforts, I also saw failures among those who subsequently served under my command. Yet if an officer corps is to serve the nation as it should, firm dedication to a high moral code must always be the goal. One of the most exciting events of my plebe year was the commencement address by the Army Chief of Staff, General MacArthur, who was much as any man extolled such a code. Already a distinguished soldier even before World War II and the Korean War, General MacArthur spoke at a time when pacifism and economy imperiled the military services and the nation's security. While warning against misguided pacifism and politically inspired economy, he spoke of West Point as "the soul of the Army."”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

"The military code that you perpetuate," he said, "has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry. It will stand the test of any code of ethics or philosophy."
Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 11.

War, Age, World, Education

“Once one learns how to speak a language, the authority of the language has fulfilled its aim, but is not thereby overcome. Authority remains as the entry to the inquiry one has undertaken. It is not overcome or passed by so much as it is actualized, fulfilled. That is why philosophic reformations seem too often to be nested within what it is they seek to reform. Insofar as it begins from its predecessor, every attempted reformation is only the confession of the authority of its predecessor's discourse. The appearance of abrupt 'revolutions' in philosophy is produced only by ignoring, sometimes ingenuously, the authority of previous speech.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

Appearance

“The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. […] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.”

Steven Pressfield book Killing Rommel

Richmond Chapman, p. 177
Killing Rommel (2008)

Time, Fight

“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.””

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-1, "Introduction"; p. 1-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Truth, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“In our time of ever-increasing specialization, there is a tendency to concern ourselves with relatively narrow scientific problems. The broad foundations of our present-day scientific knowledge and its historical development tend to be forgotten too often. This is an unfortunate trend, not only because our horizon becomes rather limited and our perspective somewhat distorted, but also because there are many valuable lessons to be learned in looking back over the years during which the basic concepts and the fundamental laws of a particular scientific discipline were first formulated.”

Emil Wolf

in Einstein's Researches on the Nature of Light, [Emil Wolf, Selected works of Emil Wolf: with commentary, World Scientific, 2001, 9810242042, 536]

Law, Knowledge, Problem, Time

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.”

William Blake The Little Black Boy

The Little Black Boy, st. 4
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Love

“I went in thinking: "I'm not going to find out that Darwinism is a fraud. I'll probably find out these (intelligent design proponents) are frauds." But I wound up knowing a lot more than when I started. I learned that Darwinism is being overhyped, and that it doesn't really convey what's going on. Sometimes if you follow a "truth" far enough, it becomes a lie.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Truth, Lie, Intelligence, Fraud

“You learn very very quickly that it is mostly about swearing, actually. That's all you're doing, swearing, in a box with wheels.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On driving
Like, Totally (2006)

Box

“We [Helen and Clement Greenberg] went through the hill towns of Italy together, and we'd picnic in Perugia and argue about the Quattrocento painters and why this Simone Martini was better than that Simone Martini, or why this Sienese guy was better than that guy from Orvieto. I learned how to look at modern pictures because of Old Masters, and vice versa.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

Guy

“The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics… I learned during my youth how hard it was for farm families to stay solvent. Farm product prices fell abruptly by more than half. Banks went bankrupt and many farmers suffered foreclosures. Was politics or economics to blame? I opted for economics.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

" Nobelprize.org: Autobiography http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1979/schultz-autobio.html," in: Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992

War, Youth, World, Family

“The ability to learn is older — as it is also more widespread — than is the ability to teach.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 44

Quotes about learning page 51

Quotes about learning
page 51