Quotes about learning
page 55

“[E]ven if a person excels in Torah and good deeds more than all his contemporaries, if he has not learned the secrets of Torah and the wisdom of truth, he must reincarnate in the world (…) Now the matter is clarified—the whole part of the revealed Torah is but a preparation to become worthy and merit attaining the concealed part. It is the concealed part that is very wholeness and the purpose for which man is created.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Torah

Wisdom, Truth, Secret, World

“Has there ever been a revolution that produced something better than what it overthrew? The only thing people learn from being oppressed is how to oppress others!”

Kage Baker book Sky Coyote

Source: Sky Coyote (1999), Chapter 22 (p. 172)

People

“I've moved on, grown and learned in the years since then, and am designing interfaces that make the Mac's GUI feel as clumsy to use as the Mac made the old DOS-based systems feel primitive.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

MacUser interview (2004)

Guy, Feeling

“There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

The Hindu interview (2012)

People, World, Democracy, Strong

“Home cooking is good for you, and I eat out less. But that's the least of it. What has surprised me is how stimulating it is. How satisfying. You learn a lot about plants and animals. You begin to recognise your place in the world.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

[Michael Pollan: Why the family meal is crucial to civilisation, Sat 25 May 2013, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/25/michael-pollan-family-meal-civilisation, 2018-05-23]

World, Home, Animals, Cooking

“To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, "Modern Systems Theory – An Outlook for Coping with Change", paper given in the 1970 John Umstead Distinguished Lectures at North Carolina Department of Mental Health, Research Division, on 5 February 1970, and appeared in Revue Francaise de Sociologie, October 1969, p. 16
1970s and later

Question, Knowledge, Waiting

“The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn.”

John Marks Templeton (1912–2008) stock investor, businessman and philanthropist

The Quotable Sir John

God, People, Search, Hurt

“How important, therefore, to learn before leaving England to move man through God by prayer alone.”

James Hudson Taylor A Retrospect

(J. Hudson Taylor. A Retrospect. Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, n.d., 15).

God

“We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 137.

Understanding, Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 144
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Reading

“The Spirit of Awakening is known to be of two kinds: the spirit of aspiring for Awakening, and the spirit of venturing toward awakening. Just as one perceives the difference between a person who yearns to travel and a traveler, so do the learned recognize the corresponding difference between these two.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

§ 1.15
Bodhicaryavatara, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

Travel, Personality

“Candid, and generous, and just,
Boys care but little whom they trust,
An error soon corrected—
For who but learns in riper years
That man, when smoothest he appears
Is most to be suspected?”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"Friendship", line 19 (1782).

Error, Boy, Appearance

“The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: World Commodities and World Currencies (1944), Chapter I, The Problem of Raw Materials, p. 5

World

“It’s going too far! My God, look what has already happened. The scientists make fantastic new discoveries which are immediately taken over by a group, almost a breed of men, who always know what’s best for the rest of us. Science learns how to split the atom, and they immediately know that the best thing to do with that new knowledge is to blow up Hiroshima!”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1970), Chapter 22 (p. 389)

Men, God, Knowledge, Science

“There are two subcategories of holist called irredundant holists and redundant holists. Students of both types image an entire system of facts or principles. Though an irredundant holist’s image is rightly interconnected, it contains only relevant and essential constitents. In contrast, redundant holists entertain images that contain logically irrelevant or overspecific material, commonly derived from data used to "enrich" the curriculum, and these students embed the salient facts and principles in a network of redundant items. Though logically irrelevant, the items in question are of great psychological importance to a "redundant holist", since he uses them to access, retain and manipulate whatever he was originally required to learn.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Learning Strategies and Individual Competence (1972), p. 258.

Question

“What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

Secret, World, Idea

“Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.”

N. R. Narayana Murthy (1946) Indian businessman

Life lessons from Narayana Murthy (2013)

Failure, Thinking, Success

“I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the "Tree of Knowledge". It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan interviewed by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. — "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe … and Carl Sagan" http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ann_druyan_talks_about_science_religion/. Skeptical Inquirer 27 (6). November–December 2003.

Question, Knowledge, Thinking, Tree

“Yes, it [making Expelled] has made my belief in that [Intelligent Design] much stronger. It has pointed out something which haunted me ever since I learned about Darwinism, which is, Where did it all start? How did life start? Darwinism has nothing to say about that--nothing useful, anyway--but I think Intelligent Design has a great deal to say about it.”

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

Interviews: Ben Stein is Expelled! Christianity Today Movies, Christianity Today Movies: Interview with Ben Stein, 15 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/benstein.html,

Life, Intelligence, Thinking

“I have learned to daydream, I have had the opportunity to see my friends grow together with me, but I have not been able to see myself grow up. Sometimes it is difficult to recognize a #TBT with a great meaning behind it. Think as an adult and dream as a child, but never forget who you are and why you are daydreaming.”

Williemgc (1994) Dominican singer-songwriter, record producer and actor

Message to his fans via Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BOS5YciAu0D/, 21 December, 2016

Dreams, Thinking, Forgetting

“The organization of his ideas was all wrong; I was drawn to the memory of myself -- a mere stripling of a girl -- the day I learned that the shortest distance between any two points was a great circle.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Floating Truth"

Girl, Idea, Memory

“[that] simple people brought their bodies and shared their scanty bread with the artists. Kirchner learned the course of life again in their houses.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

later quote of Kirchner (writing in the third person); as quoted in Claire Louise Albiez https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272168564, in Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May 2013, p. 38 about the relaxed atmosphere, not only found in die Brücke's ateliers, but also through the Brücke-artists' contact to common people in the working quarter of the city of Dresden, c. 1906-10 undated

Life, People, Housing

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.”

Daniel Handler book The Penultimate Peril

The Penultimate Peril (2005)

Life, World, Reading, Siblings

“Giraffes do use their long necks to browse leaves, at the tops of acacia trees - but such current function, no matter how vital, does not prove that the neck originally evolved for this purpose. The neck may have first lengthened in context of a different use, and then been coopted for better dining when giraffes moved into the open plains. Or the neck may have evolved to perform several functions at once. We cannot learn the reasons for historical origin simply by listing current uses.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 317
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Tree

“O man, no matter what you have studied or how much you have studied, do not follow the ways of your mind with conceit in your learning. Ask a man of wisdom who is on the path and follow his directions. If you do not meet a man of wisdom, lay your heart open and ask even a tree or a wall. The power of God within your heart called conscience will caution you and guide you. It will say, "Go," or "Don't go," "Right," or "Wrong." If your heart is open, your conscience will provide useful fruit which will benefit your journey through life.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Life, Wisdom, God, Way

“Oh Carol, don't let him steal your heart away
I'm gonna learn to dance if it takes me all night and day”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Carol" (1958)
Song lyrics

Heart, Dance, Night

“We often interact with professionals who exercise their judgment with evident confidence, sometimes priding themselves on the power of their intuition. In a world rife with illusions of validity and skill, can we trust them? How do we distinguish the justified confidence of experts from the sincere overconfidence of professionals who do not know they are out of their depth? We can believe an expert who admits uncertainty but cannot take expressions of high confidence at face value. As I first learned on the obstacle field, people come up with coherent stories and confident predictions even when they know little or nothing. Overconfidence arises because people are often blind to their own blindness.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence, The New York Times, 19 October 2011, 15 May 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" (2011)

People, World, Exercises, Confidence

“Like most loners,” said Moddik, “you carry the seeds of violent authority. Loners need to be bossy. They quickly learn it’s the only method they have of shoving people off their backs.”

Tanith Lee book Drinking Sapphire Wine

Part 3, Chapter 8 (p. 137)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

People

“.. we parted in 1914, when Kandinsky, being an enemy alien [because of his Russian nationality], had to flee from Germany to Switzerland, as did Jawlensky and Marianne de Werefkin too [to neutral Switzerland]... Ever since we parted in 1914, I have worked mainly by myself. After the First World War, here in Munich, we found that our Blue Rider group had broken up. Franz Marc and Macke had both been killed [in World War 1. ] Kandinsky, Jawlensky and Marianne were no longer here; Bloch and Burliuk were in America. Those of us who were still in Munich remained friends, of course, but each one of us had learned to work by himself rather than in a group. Besides.... we had always been individualists and our Blue Rider group never had a style of its own as uniform as that of the Paris cubists.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 121

War, World, Parting

“I appeal to the contemptible speech made lately by Sir Robert Peel to an applauding House of Commons. "Orders of merit," said he, "were the proper rewards of the military" (the desolators of the world in all ages). "Men of science are better left to the applause of their own hearts." Most learned legislator! Most liberal cotton-spinner! Was your title the proper reward of military prowess? Pity, you hold not the dungeon-keys of an English Inquisition! Perhaps Science, like Creeds, would flourish best under a little persecution.”

John Joseph Griffin (1802–1877) English chemist and publisher

Chemical Recreations (7th Edition, 1834) "The Romance of Chemistry" p232

Men, Age, World, Science

“Two roads diverged in a wood, I took the one less travelled
I'm patient so that's one less hassle
If I dream it, I can live it
I've seen the light with vivid imagery
I need to write with fits of energy
But it's hard tryin' to get where I'm goin'
Without a hint or an omen
It's too late to turn around
Perseverance, gotta learn it now
But I'm stubborn how
Am I supposed to survive this rollercoaster hurtlin' to the ground?”

Danny! (1983) American rapper

"F.O.O.D."
Albums, F.O.O.D. (2005)

Dreams, Light

“We must face the fact that, though the free intelligence and the spirit of community are at once the goal and an essential means, they may be not only ineffectual but actually harmful, unless they are combined with a full measure of that hot indignation against tyranny, that devoted service in the struggle for the new order, which is characteristic of the best minds of the political Left. On the other hand, the political Left, if it is to capture the imagination and allegiance of the people of this country and sweep them forward to victory, must, I believe, learn a more liberal spirit. I mean, of course, liberal not in the political but in the cultural sense, namely, loyalty to the free critical intelligence and respect for the human individual.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter XIII: The Practical Upshot

People, Imagination, Intelligence, Communication

“Ricardo's theory is absolutely right—within its narrow confines. His theory correctly says that, accepting their current levels of technology as given, it is better for countries to specialize in things that they are relatively better at. One cannot argue with that. His theory fails when a country wants to acquire more advanced technologies—that is, when it wants to develop its economy. It takes time and experience to absorb new technologies, so technologically backward producers need a period of protection from international competition during this period of learning. Such protection is costly, because the country is giving up the chance to import better and cheaper products. However, it is a price that has to be paid if it wants to develop advanced industries. Ricardo's theory is, thus seen, for those who accept the status quo but not for those who want to change it.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 2: 'The double life of Daniel Defoe; How did the rich countries become rich?', The double life of the British economy, p. 47

Change, Chance, Time, Country

“Reader, — This Enchiridion, I present thee with, is the Fruit of Solitude: A School few care to learn in, tho' None Instructs us better. Some Parts of it are the Result of serious Reflection: Others the Flashings of Lucid Intervals: Writ for private Satisfaction, and now publish'd for an Help to Human Conduct.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

The Preface
Fruits of Solitude (1682)

School, Solitude, Help, Parting

“All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 6 (p. 171)

Thinking

“History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.”

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

Speech on Afghanistan (4 January 1980) http://millercenter.org/president/carter/speeches/speech-3403 Presidency (1977–1981), 1978

World, Disease, History

“As you grow spiritually, you will find yourself teaching more as you learn more. Your learning and your teaching will take place even in your sleep.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 26

Sleep

“One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Aphorisms

“[We learn] from this that we tell only part of a man's qualities in his presence, and all of them when he is not present.”

Rashi (1040–1105) French rabbi and commentator

Genesis 7,1
Ethics

Parting

“For 5 years I've been traveling across the country — learning and listening. And one of the most hopeful signs I've seen is the building of an essential, new awareness of how terrible and threatening drug abuse is to our society. This was one of the main purposes when I started, so of course it makes me happy that that's been accomplished. But each time I meet with someone new or receive another letter from a troubled person on drugs, I yearn to find a way to help share the message that cries out from them.”

Nancy Reagan (1921–2016) actress and first lady of the United States

Just Say No (1986)

Happiness, Hope, Way, Travel

“With all this science and physics and so forth that I absorbed. I did have one early experience with engineering, however. When we got the Book of Knowledge, I found on one page a diagram for a short-wave radio. I thought it would be neat to try to make a shortwave radio, so I arranged with all the radio repairmen in the town that whenever they were going to junk a radio, they should set it aside and I would pick it up. I got all these old radios -- really classics now -- that I stripped. I had huge transformers and loudspeakers and huge condensers -- the whole works. Boxes full of this stuff. I didn't understand it. I didn't know a thing about it. I just liked to take things apart and learn how to solder. I discovered out of my collection of parts -- with the tuning condensers (with movable plates), the knobs, and all that stuff, that I had what seemed to be needed in this one page diagram of a shortwave receiver.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1984), p. 11-12.

Books, Understanding, Knowledge, Science

“Like the intricately rational web of theology woven around the irrational mysteries of faith, the sober explanations of institutions for hoarding literary relics seem like elegant post-factum justifications for what is essentially a sense of sacred awe. An institution of learning seeks significant manuscripts because they possess qualities that scholarship cannot entirely reproduce — an authentic, holistic connection with the great writers of the past. It is not the intellectual content of the manuscript that is important but its material presence — ink spots, tobacco stains, pinworm holes, and foxing included.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"The Magical Value of Manuscripts," http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ehop.htm The Hudson Review (Spring 1996); later published as an introduction to The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, ed. Rodney Phillips (1997) Essays

Faith, Sense, Past

“I am not commenting on the contradictions, prevarications, pretensions, and plain lies contained in these lines from a “learned historian” whose monograph was published by a prestigious British publisher. I am sure the readers will see for themselves the sheer scoundrelism of this apologetics. What I want to show in these quotations is the mind which the secularists in India have swallowed - hook, line, and sinker. It is this mind which our secularists have been cultivating over the years. And I am absolutely sure that the NCERT is out to patronise this mind.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

“The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget — but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 6
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

Hate, Children, Madness, Forgetting

“Every now and then it's nice to stop and just look over what you've been writing and the way you've been writing it and sort of reassess it, and see if you've fallen into bad habits or there's something you'd like to get better at. One way of reexamining your own work is to work with somebody else. It's a learning experience. I don't want to get into a rut.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

As quoted in "Forever Amber" (October 1991) http://web.archive.org/web/20080212112534/http://zelazny.corrupt.net/amberever.html

Way

“Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Comic 1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Books, Letters and Social Aims http://www.rwe.org/comm/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=74&Itemid=149 (1876)

“First of all, my father inspired me…he is a great social activist and women's rights activist…he spoke out. And he spoke for women's rights…that hard situation, he inspired me, because he spoke. And that's what I learned from him.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Statements in PBS interview with Margaret Warner (October 11, 2013)

Women

“I have learned by experience that there is but one God that pertains to this people, and He is the God that pertains to this earth-the first man. That first man sent his own Son to redeem the world, to redeem his brethren; his life was taken, his blood shed, that our sins might be remitted. That Son called twelve men and ordained them to be Apostles, and when he departed the keys of the kingdom were deposited with three of those twelve, viz.: Peter, James, and John. Peter held the keys pertaining to that Presidency, and he was the head.”

Heber C. Kimball (1801–1868) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 4:1 (June 29, 1856)

Life, Men, God, People

“Conversations cease when we learn to discover the joys of internalization.”

Mahāprajña (1920–2010) Acharya or the Svetambar Terapanth sect of Jainism

Thought at Sunrise (2007)

Joy

“As a boy I remember how terribly real the statues of the saints would seem at 7 o'clock Mass-before I'd had breakfast. From that I learned always to conduct hungry.”

Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) British conductor

As quoted in The New York Times (18 April 1967)

Boy

“I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it’s occupied by someone with a good heart.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Prentice Alvin (1989), Chapter 15.

Life, Heart

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

"Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105, Vanity Fair, May 2011.

Money, Fate, Education, History

“She who had been the spoiled and petted daughter of the Duke of Kordava, learned what is was to be a buccaneer's plaything, and because she was supple enough to bend without breaking, she lived where other women had died, and because she was young and vibrant with life, she came to find pleasure in the existence.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Pool of the Black One" (1933)

Life, Women, Pleasure, Daughters

“Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create… Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional “inputs” into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. “It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.”

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist

"The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka," 2008

Understanding, Business, Knowledge

“Quite frankly, several of the people who contributed to the article should be banned from coming near a keyboard until they have learned to engage in proper encyclopedia writing.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Source: In a discussion about Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:BonziBUDDY&diff=74314772&oldid=74246581 (07 September 2006)

People

“A one-night-stander is someone who does not dare to explore the full potential of a relationship, just like a child who is afraid to go to the deep part of the pool. The latter does not want to learn how to swim, the former does not want to learn how to live.”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Zire Notes (May 2004 - December 2006)

Parting, Night

“Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

with warnings Torvalds, Linus, 2015-09-03, <nowiki>Linus Torvalds on the LKM mailing list</nowiki>, 2015-09-30 https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/3/428, 2010s, 2015

People, Christ

“Maybe knowledge doesn't accrue, maybe it doesn't happen sequentially. Maybe I need to go back and read Hunger of Memory again. Maybe there's a wisdom that I had in those years that I need to learn from now. And maybe there will be a year when I will have the courage to read that book. When I think about it or when I hear other people talk about it, it strikes me as very naked prose, and I'm embarrassed by it. I'm embarrassed by how much I told you. And people say, "Well you didn't tell us you were gay." Or "You didn't tell us you had all these friends or that you were student body president. You never said that."”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

I think to myself, "My God, but what I told you I've never told anybody. And I'll never tell anybody again."
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Wisdom, Hunger, God, People

“When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

On gender issues in the entertainment industry — reported in Geoff Pevere (April 13, 2007) "Berry almost chose bylines over marquees", The Toronto Star, p. D06.

School, Business, Change

“I got a lot of benefit from auditing. It was the fastest and deepest way to handle situations that I had yet encountered. I immediately wanted to learn to do it. … With Scientology, I was able to characterize the Mind more accurately, and to cease justifying it. This greatly clarified what I was doing. … After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the Mind as a machine. I can now operate my Mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments - the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things. Many people can do such things, and they are well known in the yogic tradition.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 146-47, 0-517-53502-5]

Pain, People, Way

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

"Life After Lebanon" (1984), later published in On Call : Political Essays (1985), and Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)

Life, Pain, Truth, Fear

“We did not yet have laws or order. We were like children just learning to walk.”

Pol Pot (1925–1998) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea

On the Democratic Kampuchea period, as reported by David Ashley (1995) and quoted in David P. Chandler, Brother Number One (1999)
Attributed

Children, Law

“Dreams are funny like that. You want something so desperately, you somehow get it, then just as suddenly it's over. Like running races--all that training for a couple of minutes on the track. The secret, I've learned, is to appreciate the process.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Nicholas Sparks, Chapter 12, p. 206
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)

Secret, Dreams, Training

“They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries

Art

“[S]poken or colloquial Chinese is […] in fact the language of a child. Now as a proof of this, we all know how easily European children learn colloquial or spoken Chinese, while learned philogues and sinologues insist in saying that Chinese is so difficult. Chinese, colloquial Chinese, I say again is the language of a child. My first advice therefore to my foreign friends who want to learn Chinese is "Be ye like little children, you will then not only enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but you will also be able to learn Chinese."”

Gu Hongming book The Spirit of the Chinese People

page 103
The Spirit of the Chinese People (1915), Chinese Language

Children

“The large establishment of wives and servants rendered the nobles immobile. No Indian scholars, engineers or travellers went abroad to learn the skills the Europeans were developing in their countries. While people from Europe were frequently coming to Hindustan, no Indian nobleman could go to the West because he could not live without his harem and he could not take with him his cumbersome harem to countries situated so far away. Europe at this time was forging ahead in science and technology through its Industrial Revolution, but the Mughal elites kept themselves insulated from this great stride because of inertia. Consequently, the country was pulled back from marching with progress, a deficiency which has not been able to be made up until now.”

K. S. Lal book The Mughal Harem

Source: The Mughal Harem (1988), p.203.

People, Travel, Science, Time

“Sharpe bellowed in anger, the war shout. They thought him weak and beaten, but he had one fight in him and they would learn what a Rifleman was in a fight.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 186
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Honor (1985)

War, Fight, Anger

“If one doesn’t learn from one’s unhappy experiences,” he wisely observed, “what’s the point of all that suffering?”

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 4 (p. 53)

Suffering

“With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part V, ch. 26 (Mary Lewis)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

“The Lord Cherisher of the Faith learnt that in the provinces of Tatta, Multan, and especially at Benares, the Brahman misbelievers used to teach their false books in their established schools, and that admirers and students both Hindu and Muslim, used to come from great distances to these misguided men in order to acquire this vile learning. His Majesty, eager to establish Islam, issued orders to the governors of all the provinces to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and with the utmost urgency put down the teaching and the public practice of the religion of these misbelievers. (…) It was reported that, according to the Emperor's command, his officers had demolished the temple of Viswanath at Kashi.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

1669. Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh). Maasir-i-Alamgiri, translated into English by Sir Jadu-Nath Sarkar, Calcutta, 1947, pp. 51-55; see Ayodhya Revisited https://books.google.com/books?id=gKKaDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA567 by Kunal Kishore, quoted in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins. (Different translation: “News came to court that in accordance with the Emperor’s command his officers had demolished the temple of Vishvanath [Bishwanath] at Banaras”. ... The Emperor ordered the governors of all the provinces to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and strongly put down their teaching and religious practices.” ) Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Aurangzeb / Quotes from late medieval histories / 1660s Quotes from late medieval histories, 1660s

Men, Books, School, Faith

“These reminiscences are neither history, biography nor a diary, although they comprise something of each of these categories. What is presented is far from a complete account even of all of the incidents in which I had a part, but merely my recollections of events, refreshed by a reference to my own memoranda and a free use of staff studies and historical records made under my direction and supervision. It may assist the future historian when he seeks to account for the motives and reasons which influenced some of the actions in the great drama of war. It is also my hope that it will prove of some interest to the rising generations, who may learn thereform that a country and government such as ours is worth fighting for, and dying for, if need be.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. v

War, Hope, History, Motivation

“There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

citation needed

People, Art, Time

“Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 21, § 255
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

“I have learned to never give up, to take the necessary risks to win and to seek victory amid defeat. This is the spirit of Taiwan. We stick with it to the end and never quit.”

Eric Chu (1961) Taiwanese politician

Eric Chu (2015) cited in " Baseball inspires hope for last-minute victories: Chu http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/10/28/2003631117" on Taipei Times, 28 October 2015.

Victory

“Vertical mathematising is the most likely part of the learning process for the bonds with reality to be loosened and eventually cut.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Revisiting Mathematics Education (1991), p. 68

Reality, Parting

“I was very sickly and weak during the first years of my infancy, and was, as much as I can remember of myself, a very whimsical boy. Sometimes I learned with enthusiasm, and often found myself in such a kind of ecstasy, that I neither could see nor hear what passed around me. In these fits of thought I forgot playthings and playfellows; I was happy only in my own musings. I always preferred the company of little girls to boys. I was not ten years old when I presented them with some poetry and little verses, the effusions of my heated imagination; some of them fell into my hands in riper years, and after reading them over, I left off poetry altogether. I loved my first private teacher very much; I even can remember him now. My second teacher was a simpleton; he could never understand me, nor enter into my feelings. My antipathy to this man grew daily greater; I could not learn of him, nor could he teach me anything. At last, when in my thirteenth year, I got rid of him, and he being encumbered with debts, I gave him my saving-box when he left. Whether I did this for pity's sake, or joy to get rid of him, I did not know.”

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

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Love, Happiness, Feeling, Imagination

“There is no point in hiding that before the war we mostly learned to attack, and did not pay enough attention to such an important manoeuvre as retreat. Now we have paid for this. It turned out that the commanders and the staff were not sufficiently prepared to prepare and execute the retreat manoeuvre. Now, in the second week of war, we had in fact to learn from the beginning the most difficult art - the art of the execution of retreat.”

Hovhannes Bagramyan (1897–1982) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The System of the International Organizations of the Communist Countries" - Page 36 - by Richard Szawlowski - 1976

War, Art

““At least Bharatanatyam is now world famous, with thousands of new votaries. What about Koodiyattam?….. I have done what I can. It has not been easy. One has to sacrifice a lot to learn Koodiyattam. How many persons will be ready for it these days? Will there be an audience capable of imbibing it? ”
-Shri. Māni Mādhava Chākyār to famous Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Dev Arundale, while latter visitited Guru at his residence”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Source: P.T. Narendra Menon, Kulapati of Koodiyattam, Sruti- India's premier Music and Dance magazine, August 1990 issue (71), p. 27.

World, Personality

“If you desire ease, forsake learning.
If you desire learning, forsake ease.
How can the man at his ease acquire knowledge,
And how can the earnest student enjoy ease?”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

The Tree of Wisdom http://books.google.com/books?id=d3TX5peeoSsC&pg=PP17&dq=%22If+you+desire+ease+forsake+learning+If+you+desire+learning+forsake+ease+How+can+the+man+at+his+ease+acquire+knowledge+And+how+can+the+earnest+student+enjoy+ease%22

Knowledge

“As far as my tax returns, you don't learn that much from tax returns. That I can tell you. You learn a lot from financial disclosure. And you should go down and take a look at that.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, September, First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

“I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution (2006), p. 51

God, Tear

“You have to learn to pace yourself.
Pressure.
You're just like everybody else.
Pressure.
You've only had to run so far,
So good.
But you will come to a place
Where the only thing you feel
Are loaded guns in your face.
And you'll have to deal with
Pressure.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Pressure.
Song lyrics, The Nylon Curtain (1982)

Feeling

“Much learning shows how little mortals know;
Much wealth, how little worldlings can enjoy.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VI, Line 519.

Wealth

““I don’t have much confidence,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been taught isn’t making sense.”
“That’s the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn’t fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow.””

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 16 (p. 354)

Way, Confidence, Intelligence, Understanding

“A lot of learning can
be a little thing.”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor

England Home and Beauty for Sale, Small Dreams of a Scorpion: Poems (1972)

“Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Children, Education, Nature, Teachers

“We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. It goes against our conscience, which is a very tender part of the American spirit. Therefore we are learning how to hold our allies, not by force of arms and government, but by mutual benefit and friendship. So much is already clear…
I am therefore hopeful. In spite of dismaying contradictions in individuals in our national scene, I feel the controlling spirit or our people, generous, decent, and sane. In this mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 407, This has sometimes been quoted as "In a mood of faith and hope..."

Friendship, People, Books, Faith

“The Poet's License! — 't is the right,
Within the rule of duty,
To look on all delightful things
Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars
That in the skies are glowing;
To see the gems of perfect dye
That in the woods are growing, —
And more than sage astronomer,
And more than learned florist,
To read the glorious homilies
Of Firmament and Forest.”

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) American poet

"The Poet's License".
The Masquerade and Other Poems (1866)

World, Beauty, Star, Reading

“The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man — whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (2000), p. 245

Food, Behavior, Nature, Animals

“The study he conducted with Dabholkar goes to explain why astrology is not a science through a simple experiment. They adopted an experiment conducted by Bernie Silverman, a graduate student of Michigan State University, USA. They collected horoscopes of 100 scholarly students and 100 students with learning difficulties.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Astrology came with Alexander, says Jayant Narlikar

Study, Universe, Science

“I have written this work not to teach men what they do not know, but to remind them of what they already know and is very evident to them, for you will find in most of my words only things which most people know, and concerning which they entertain no doubts. But to the extent that they are well known and their truths revealed to all, so is forgetfulness in relation to them extremely prevalent. … It is possible that the reader will find that he has learned little after having read it that he did not know before. Its benefit is to be derived, rather, through review and persistent study, by which one is reminded of those things which, by nature, he is prone to forget and through which he is caused to take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Men, People, Truth, Nature

“Kull was still mazed. "But being a wizard, having knowledge of all the ages and despising gold, glory, and position, what could Kaanuub offer Tuzun Thune that would make of him a foul traitor?"
"Gold, power, and position," grunted Brule. "The sooner you learn that men are men whether wizard, king, or thrall, the better you will rule, Kull."”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" (1929)

Men, Age, Knowledge

“Atheists are also morally obligated to tell the truth as we see it. We should preach and proselytize too. We need to help believers. Someone who believes in god is wasting big parts of his or her life, holding back science and love, and giving "moral" support to dangerous extremists. If you believe something, you must share it; it's one of the ways we all learn about truth.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

p. 62 http://books.google.com/books?id=OqwtBujvOmgC&pg=PA62&dq=%22atheists+are+also+morally+obligated%22 2010s, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (2011)

Love, Life, God, Truth