Quotes about learning
page 8

“Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

God, Pleasure, Truth, Way

“By far the most vital lesson I have ever learned is the importance of what we think. If I knew what you think, I would know what you are. Our thoughts make us what we are.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), p. 5

Thinking

“My published work is just a record of my learning. I'm sharing it with people so they won't make the same mistakes that I did. It's been a painful and slow process. My work is like a journey, a journey of discovery.”

Thomas J. Sargent (1943) American economist

Thomas J. Sargent, in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer

Pain, People

“There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is, to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise. I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn, leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength of the rebellion, is its military — its army. That army dominates all the country, and all the people, within its range. Any offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that army, is simply nothing for the present; because such man or men, have no power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, if one were made with them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to James C. Conkling (1863)

Men, People, Peace, Way

“Learning and enjoyment are the secret to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, enjoyment without learning dulls you.”

Richard David Precht (1964) German philosopher and author

Quote translated from his German book: Wer bin ich – und wenn ja, wie viele? Eine philosophische Reise, Goldmann, München 2007, ISBN 3-442-31143-8

Life, Secret

“As a teacher and parent, I've had a very personal interest in seeking new ways of teaching. Like most other teachers and parents, I've been well aware — painfully so, at times — that the whole teaching/learning process is extraordinarily imprecise, most of the time a hit-and-miss operation. Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.237

Way, Thinking, Parent, Teachers

“My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)

Children, Way, Home, Literature

“And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as support for the earth, which is sort of a broad trough. Any power which in disposing them as they are disposes them for the best never enters into their minds, not do they imagine that there is any superhuman strength in that; they rather expect to find another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good is, and are clearly of the opinion that the obligatory and containing power of the good is as nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me. But as I have failed either to discover myself or to learn of anyone else, the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have found to be the second best mode of inquiring into the cause.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

World, Imagination, Support, Nature

“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 4.
Naturalis Historia

Nature

“In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—“Geist”—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

as quoted in The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Free Press: 1977), p. 187

Silence

“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 5

Life, Teachers

“Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Source: The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

Forgetting

“Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (9) "Guncrit"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

People, History

“They kept on hollering, and I simply had to put my foot down. I said, 'I'm the governor and I say the ignorant in this state have to learn, blacks as well as whites.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

And they learned.
Huey Long on conservative resistance to illiteracy programs for Negroes (Williams p. 706)

“Being asked what learning is the most necessary, he replied, "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn."”

Antisthenes (-444–-365 BC) Greek philosopher

§ 7
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius

“If the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost to us at birth, and afterwords by the use of the senses we recovered that which we previously knew, will not that which we call learning be a process of recovering our knowledge, and may not this be rightly termed recollection by us? …Then, Simmias, our souls must have existed before they were in the form of man—without bodies, and must have had intelligence.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Soul, Intelligence, Birth, Knowledge

“You nobles, you sons of my leading men, soft and dandified, trusting in your birth and your wealth, paying no attention to my command and your advancement, you neglected the pursuit of learning and indulged yourselves in the sport of pleasure and idleness and foolish pastimes. By the King of the heavens I think nothing of your nobility and your beauty. Others can admire you. Know this without any doubt; unless you rapidly make up for your idleness by eager effort, you will never receive any benefit from Charlemagne.”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Quoted in Notker's The Deeds of Charlemagne (translated 2008 by David Ganz)

Men, Pleasure, Beauty, Birth

“They [Georgian military forces] launched their attacks at 23:30 [on August 7]. I learned about it the following morning. I spoke to Bush. He said 'No one wants war.' We expected something would happen, I met him again at the stadium. I can't tell you in detail the content of the conversation, but I had the feeling that his administration wouldn't do anything about stopping the conflict, It's a court which makes a king. Maybe the court thought the king shouldn't intervene.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Speaking to western journalists and academics in Sochi for the first time since the Georgia crisis began. (September 2008) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/12/putin.georgia 2006- 2010

War, Feeling

“In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.”

Thomas Mann book The Coming Victory of Democracy

The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)

Hostility

“Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

“I’m very happy that so many children are learning the piano because of me.”

Li Yundi (1982) Chinese pianist

telegraph.co.uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/10863146/Lang-Lang-Weve-never-met.html

Happiness, Children

“What's come to perfection perishes.
Things learned on earth we shall practise in heaven;
Works done least rapidly Art most cherishes.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Old Pictures in Florence, xvii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Art, Perfection

“No science of any kind can be divorced from ethical considerations… Science is a human learning process which arises in certain subcultures in human society and not in others, and a subculture as we seen is a group of people defined by acceptance of certain common values, that is, an ethic which permits extensive communication between them.”

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

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 2 cited in: John B. Davis (2011) Kenneth Boulding as a Moral Scientist http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=econ_workingpapers Working paper

People, Communication, Science

“I've learned love is like a brick, you can build a house or sink a dead body.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Lyrics, Judas.

Love, Housing, Dead

“What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

A modern fabrication, possibly derived from David Barton's claim (Original Intent, p. 85) that "By George Washington’s own words, what youths learned in America’s schools 'above all' was 'the religion of Jesus Christ.'”. Washington did use the phrase "above all the religion of Jesus Christ" on 12 May 1779 in a reply to a petition from a Lenape delegation asking for assistance in promoting the missionary activities of David Zeisberger among their people: "You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do every thing they can to assist you in this wise intention..." He did not say anything about "What students would learn in American schools," though earlier in the same reply he did say "I am glad you have brought three of the Children of your principal Chiefs to be educated with us." While there's nothing in the reply about how those "Children" might be educated (in fact Congress put two of them through Princeton) it's possible that suggested the fabricated portion. See Louise Phelps Kellogg, Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio 1778-1779 (Madison WI, 1916), pp. 317-324, for the episode. Washington's reply is also found in John C. Fitzpatrick, The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, vol. 15 (Washington D.C., 1936), p. 55
Misattributed, Spurious attributions

School, Religion, Christ

“That's silly talk… Talk to my wife. She'll tell me I need to learn to just put my socks on the hamper.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"Barack the Blessed" by Jim Geraghty in National Review (27 July 2004) http://www.nationalreview.com/geraghty/geraghty200407270212.asp quoting Obama on his Presidential aspirations as stated on Meet the Press the previous Sunday. 2004

“That fondness for science, … that affability and condescension which God shows to the learned, that promptitude with which he protects and supports them in the elucidation of obscurities and in the removal of difficulties, has encouraged me to compose a short work on calculating by al-jabr and al-muqabala, confining it to what is easiest and most useful in arithmetic.”

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

As quoted in: Victor J. Katz (2009) A history of mathematics: an introduction. p. 271

God, Support, Science

“They communicate, but their communication system is through touch, posture, looks – body language you could call it, but it goes a bit deeper than that. They can learn 400 or more signs in American sign language.”

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

Wanderlust interview (2009)

Communication

“Each of us who came here with wisdom must learn from this school. Heaven does not come from building beautiful churches, mosques, and temples. Man must build his church, mosque, and temple within himself. The house of God must be built within. The place of worship must be seen within. The completeness of God must be built within the self. If man can understand his story and the story of God and then build a church within himself, that is victory.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The Wisdom of Man (1980)

Wisdom, God, School, Beauty

“At the heart of this culture is an understanding that an organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive business advantage.”

Jack Welch (1935) American executive: General Electric CEO

Cited in: Robert Slater (1998), Jack Welch & The G.E. Way: Management Insights and Leadership. p. 12

Understanding, Business, Heart

“Even today, I dare not say that I have reached a state of achievement. I'm still learning, for learning is boundless.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Part 6 "Beyond System — The Ultimate Source of Jeet Kune Do"
Jeet Kune Do (1997)

“It is not to be supposed that young men and women who are busy acquiring valuable specialized knowledge can spare a great deal of time for the study of philosophy, but even in the time that can easily be spared without injury to the learning of technical skills, philosophy can give certain things that will greatly increase the student’s value as a human being and as a citizen. It can give a habit of exact and careful thought, not only in mathematics and science, but in questions of large practical import. It can give an impersonal breadth and scope to the conception of the ends of life. It can give to the individual a just measure of himself in relation to society, of man in the present to man in the past and in the future, and of the whole history of man in relation to the astronomical cosmos. By enlarging the objects of his thoughts it supplies an antidote to the anxieties and anguish of the present, and makes possible the nearest approach to serenity that is available to a sensitive mind in our tortured and uncertain world.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

Life, Women, Men, World

“Well, I learned a lot. … You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Quoted by Lou Cannon in his article Latin [American] Trip an Eye-Opener for Reagan in The Washington Post (6 December 1982)
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

Country

“The untrapped mind is open enough to see many possibilities, humble enough to learn from anyone and anything, forbearing enough to forgive all, perceptive enough to see things as they really are, and reasonable enough to judge their true value.”

Matsushita Konosuke (1894–1989) Japanese businessman

Kōnosuke Matsushita (1989) Nurturing Dreams My Path in Life. Quoted in: Tony Kippenberger (2002), Leadership Styles: Leading 08.04. p. 73

Forgiveness

“Now, before I begin, I'd just like to clear the air about that little controversy everybody was talking about a few weeks back. I have to tell you, I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. It won't happen again. President Crow and the board of regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Commencement Address at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/DCPD-200900360/html/DCPD-200900360.htm (13 May 2009) 2009

Thinking, Sun

“A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 63

Love, Life, People, World

“Man, the period of whose life is one hundred years, should practice Dharma, Artha, and Kama at different times and in such a manner that they may harmonize, and not clash in any way. He should acquire learning in his childhood; in his youth and middle age he should attend to Artha and Kama, and in his old age he should perform Dharma, and thus seek to gain Moksha, that is, release from further transmigration.”

Vātsyāyana book Kama Sutra

Source: Kama Sutra, p. 13

Life, Youth, Age, Way

“I do feel one learns more from one's failures than from one's successes”

Moira Lister (1923–2007) actress

Sunday Times interview (1983)

Feeling, Failure, Success

“And this is what I have come to think: That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, whom I claim to be my Savior and Lord the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Lufkin, Texas http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/lufkin-texas-jul1997-full.html (July 19, 1997) In Concert

Love, Children, World, Beauty

“I learned from my dad that when you walk in front of an audience, they are the kings and queens, and you’re but the jester — and if you don’t think that way, you’re going to get very, very conceited.”

Jerry Lewis (1926–2017) American comedian, actor, film producer, writer and film director

As quoted in "Jerry Lewis on Dean Martin: 'I think of him every day.'" by Alex Scordelis, in The New York Post (26 August 2016) http://nypost.com/2016/08/26/jerry-lewis-on-dean-martin-de-niro-and-his-favorite-joke/

Way, Thinking

“They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where — because of our past excesses — it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that. And, I don't believe you do either. That is why I am seeking the presidency. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity. I don't agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands. I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other free peoples of the world.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Official Announcement http://www.reaganlibrary.com/reagan/speeches/intent.asp of being a candidate for U.S. President (13 November 1979) 1970s

Children, People, World, Dreams

“Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Life, Angels

“We’re taught in the Jewish tradition the same story over and over, whether it’s the Holocaust or the Maccabees, we have to rise above persecution and do our best, just as the magic is about making people dream, we learned to take things that aren’t supposed to be and turn them into something beautiful.”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

Jews in the News http://letmypeoplegrow.org/2011/11/jews-news-anton-yelchin-david-copperfield-billy-crystal/

People, Beauty, Dreams

“If graduates do not get relevant experience in their field of study after graduation, they will forget what they learned and, in a few years, their knowledge may be completely lost”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Quoted in Hong Kong's Career Times newspaper (February 6th 2004) http://www.ctgoodjobs.hk/english/article/show_article.asp?category_id=1070&article_id=12825&title=is-hong-kong-investing-enough-in-its-future&listby=date&listby_id=&page=4 Miscellaneous Quotes in the Press (2002-Present)

Knowledge, Study, Forgetting

“A man must read widely, a little of everything or whatever he can, but given the shortness of life and the verbosity of the world, not too much should be demanded of him. Let him begin with those titles no one should omit, commonly referred to as books for learning, as if not all books were for learning, and this list will vary according to the fount of knowledge one drinks from and the authority that monitors its flow.”

José Saramago book The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Source: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1993), p. 117

Life, Books, World, Drink

“If what we are discussing were a point of law or of the humanities, in which neither true nor false exists, one might trust in subtlety of mind and readiness of tongue and in the greater experience of the writers, and expect him who excelled in those things to make his reasoning most plausible, and one might judge it to be the best. But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself. Therefore, Simplicio, give up this idea and this hope of yours that there may be men so much more learned, erudite, and well-read than the rest of us as to be able to make that which is false become true in defiance of nature.”

Galileo Galilei book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Salviati, p. 61
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)

Men, Truth, Law, Hope

“The first economic revolution was not a revolution because it shifted man's major economic activity from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. It was a revolution because the transition created an incentive change for mankind of fundamental proportions. The incentive change stems from the different property rights under the two systems. When common property rights over resources exist, there is little incentive for the acquisition of superior technology and learning. In contrast, exclusive property rights which reward the owners provide a direct incentive to improve efficiency and productivity, or, in more fundamental terms, to acquire more knowledge and new techniques. It is this change in incentive that explains the rapid progress made by mankind in the last 10,000 years in contrast to his slow development during the long era as a primitive hunter/gatherer.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Source: The rise of the western world, 1973, p. 240-1, as cited in: Thrainn Eggertsson (1990), Economic behavior and institutions. p. 255-6

Knowledge, Change

“You can only learn so much by reading. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Books, Reading

“Last night we owned, with looks forlorn,
"Too well the scholar knows
There is no rose without a thorn" —
But peace is made! We sing, this morn,
"No thorn without a rose!"
Our Latin lesson is complete:
We've learned that Love is Bitter-Sweet!”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

A Lesson in Latin (1888), st. 3
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Love, Peace, Singing, Night

“It is a complaint without foundation that "to very few people is granted the faculty of comprehending what is imparted to them, and that most, through dullness of understanding, lose their labor and their time." On the contrary, you will find the greater number of men both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man. As birds are born to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding.”
Falsa enim est querela, paucissimis hominibus vim percipiendi quae tradantur esse concessam, plerosque vero laborem ac tempora tarditate ingenii perdere. Nam contra plures reperias et faciles in excogitando et ad discendum promptos. Quippe id est homini naturale, ac sicut aves ad volatum, equi ad cursum, ad saevitiam ferae gignuntur, ita nobis propria est mentis agitatio atque sollertia.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book I, Chapter I, 1; translation by Rev. John Selby Watson
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Men, People, Understanding, Nature

“One does not learn how to die by killing others.”

François-René de Chateaubriand book Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

Book IX: Ch. 4: Danton – Camille Desmoulins – Fabre d’Églantine.
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1848 – 1850)

“We have been housekeeping a fortnight, now—long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants' names, but not how to spell them. We shan't ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look like the alphabet out on a drunk.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 121

“"Men, Pencroft, however learned they may be, can never change anything of the cosmographical order established by God Himself.""And yet," added Pencroft, "the world is very learned. What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!""And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!" answered Harding.”

Jules Verne book The Mysterious Island

Les hommes, Pencroff, si savants qu’ils puissent être, ne pourront jamais changer quoi que ce soit à l’ordre cosmographique établi par Dieu même.— Et pourtant, ajouta Pencroff, qui montra une certaine difficulté à se résigner, le monde est bien savant! Quel gros livre, monsieur Cyrus, on ferait avec tout ce qu’on sait!
Et quel plus gros livre encore avec tout ce qu’on ne sait pas, répondit Cyrus Smith.
Part III, ch. XIV
The Mysterious Island (1874)

Men, God, Books, World

“I am not an educated man. I never had an opportunity to learn anything except how to fight..”

Pancho Villa (1878–1923) Mexican revolutionary

Education, Fight

“In Jeet Kune Do, it’s not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly that counts. ‘Being’ is more valued than "doing."”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 117

Knowledge

“I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
(Buch I) (1867)

Thinking

“O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

III, st. 3 The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

Dreams, Affliction, Winter

“In the preceding section attention was called to the fact that every point p of the straight line produces a separation of the same into two portions such that every point of one portion lies to the left of every point of the other. I find the essence of continuity in the converse, i. e., in the following principle:
"If all points of the straight line fall into two classes such that every point of the first class lies to the left of every point of the second class, then there exists one and only one point which produces this division of all points into two classes, this severing of the straight line into two portions."
…every one will at once grant the truth of this statement; the majority of my readers will be very much disappointed in learning that by this commonplace remark the secret of continuity is to be revealed.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Truth, Secret, Disappointment

“When Firuz Tughluq invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region's most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja's fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image of the god and installed it in Delhi 'in an ignominious position.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Richard Eaton: "Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states, Essays on Islam and Indian History." And: "Temple desecration in pre-modern India"

God

“Out of the unconscious you get ritual, dreams, drama, story, art, music, and that sort of buffers us. We have our little domain of competence, and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture. That's really what you learn about when you come to university if you're lucky and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible and that it should be destroyed. Why you would prefer chaos to order is beyond me. The only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means. And believe me, if you knew what chaos means, you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live in, unless you want to be a denizen of chaos. And some people do. That's when the impulses you harbor can really come out and shine. And so a little gratitude is in order, and that makes you appreciative of the wise king while being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant. That's a total conception of the world. It's balanced. Yah, we should preserve nature, but it IS trying to kill us. YES our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it IS protecting us from dying. And YES we're reasonably good people, but don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself. That's wisdom, at least in part, and that's what these stories try to teach you.”

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

Other

Wisdom, People, World, Dreams

“Something the heart must have to cherish,
Must love and joy and sorrow learn;
Something with passion clasp, or perish
And in itself to ashes burn.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book Hyperion

Hyperion, book ii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love, Passion, Heart, Joy

“One day Eugène Boudin said to me, '.. appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky'. I took his advice and together we went on long outings during which I painted constantly from nature. This was how I came to understand nature and learned to love it passionately.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

as quoted in Discovering Art, – The life time and work of the World’s greatest Artists, MONET; K.E. Sullivan, Brockhamptonpress, London 2004, p. 10
after Monet's death

Love, Understanding, Nature, Light

“Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life's work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Number 7 in the sum and substance of the Share our Wealth program (1935); quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 74.

Life, Children, Education, School

“A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1873/mar/11/second-reading-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (11 March 1873).

Light, Universe

“You trust them (white Americans), and I don't. You studied what he wanted you to learn about him in schools. I studied him in the streets and in prison, where you see the truth.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Truth, School, Study

“You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.”

Parmenides (-501–-470 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

Frag B 1.28-30, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians, vii. 3; Simplicius, Commentary on the Heavens, 557-8; Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus I, 345

Truth, Heart

“Women believed in death. Without exception. It was part of their makeup. Whereas men refused to face up to it. Not only death, in fact, but life, too: a man, learning that his wife or girlfriend is pregnant, reacts like some beast of the field - "I can't believe it's true!" - while women look at the same situation as either happy news or a momentary inconvenience.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)

Life, Death, Women, Men

“But now, some of our countrymen in this island, well affected to these studies, and the more public good, procured a most learned mathematician to translate the same into our vulgar English tongue, who after he had finished it, sent a copy of it to me, to be seen and considered on by myself. I having most willingly and gladly done the same, find it to be most exact and precisely conformable to my mind and the original. Therefore it may please you who are inclined to these studies, to receive it from me and the translator, with as much good will as we recommend it unto you.—Fare thee well.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

Canon Mirificus, Englsh edition (1616)
Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston (1834)

Study

“What is to prevent one from telling truth as he laughs, even as teachers sometimes give cookies to children to coax them into learning their A B C?”
Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.

Horace book Satires

Book I, satire i, line 24
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)

Children, Truth, Teachers

“When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug — and all programs have bugs — you've got to debug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute … and you iterate. And that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning.”

Nicholas Negroponte (1943) American computer scientist

Nicholas Negroponte: A 30-year history of the future http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_history_of_the_future, July 2014, TED Talks (about 13:40 into 19:43 video). A 30-year history of the future, TED Talk (2014)

Change

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Women, Men, Truth, Faith

“Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 26
Essais (1595), Book I

“That’s what we must pray for, each of us: a new heart. Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens. […] Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each other’s shoes and look at the world through each other’s eyes, so that maybe the police officer sees his own son in that teenager with a hoodie who's kind of goofing off but not dangerous and the teenager -- maybe the teenager will see in the police officer the same words and values and authority of his parents. With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans not just to opponents, but to enemies. With an open heart, those protesting for change will guard against reckless language going forward, look at the model set by the five officers we mourn today, acknowledge the progress brought about by the sincere efforts of police departments like this one in Dallas, and embark on the hard but necessary work of negotiation, the pursuit of reconciliation. With an open heart, police departments will acknowledge that, just like the rest of us, they are not perfect; that insisting we do better to root out racial bias is not an attack on cops, but an effort to live up to our highest ideals. […] With an open heart, we can worry less about which side has been wronged, and worry more about joining sides to do right. […] We can decide to come together and make our country reflect the good inside us, the hopes and simple dreams we share.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)

World, Fear, Dreams, Hope

“So, first of all, you’ve got to try to get people involved. And a lot of people are busy in their own lives or they don’t think it’s going to make a difference or they’re scared if they’re speaking out against authority. And many of the problems that we’re facing, like trying to create jobs or better opportunity or dealing with poverty or dealing with the environment, these are problems that have been going on for decades. And so, to think that somehow you’re going to change it in a day or a week, and then if it doesn’t happen you just give up, well, then you definitely won’t succeed. So the most important thing that I learned as a young person trying to bring about change is you have to be persistent, and you have to get more people involved, and you have to form relationships with different groups and different organizations. And you have to listen to people about what they’re feeling and what they’re concerned about, and build trust. And then, you have to try to find a small part of the problem and get success on that first, so that maybe from there you can start something else and make it bigger and make it bigger, until over time you are really making a difference in your community and in that problem. But you can’t be impatient. And the great thing about young people is they’re impatient. The biggest problem with young people is they’re impatient. It’s a strength, because it’s what makes you want to change things. But sometimes, you can be disappointed if change doesn’t happen right away and then you just give up. And you just have to stay with it and learn from your failures, as well as your successes.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall (April 2014)

People, Disappointment, Feeling, Communication

“Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

Water

“There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn’t there? Isn’t Jesus Christ’s Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 90
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

History, Effort, Appearance, Joy

“Unlike the physicist, the psychologist … investigates processes that belong to the same order—perception, learning, thinking—as those by which he conducts his investigation.”

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–1947) American philosopher

Reason and Nature (1953), p. 81

Thinking

“Among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other and to learn to love each other. It seems to me that lesson at that morning is something that we must carry with us every day.”

Deval Patrick (1956) 71st Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA

Sep. 11 Memorial service speech, Boston (September 11, 2007) http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/09/13/patrick_defends_sept_11_speech/

Love, Failure, Understanding

“We are not here to learn to play, we are here to play to learn.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

Secrets of Being Unstoppable

“To me who dreamed so much as a child, who made a dreamworld in which I was the heroine of an unending story, the lives of people around me continued to have a certain storybook quality. I learned something which has stood me in good stead many times — The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Preface (December 1960) to The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961), p. xvi; the last line was originally used in the initial edition of her autobiography: This Is My Story (1937)

People, Dreams, Time

“I'd like to live off the band, but if not, I'll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Creem magazine.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

As quoted in The Daily Of The University Of Washington (1989-05-05).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print

History

“"Why is everyone here so happy except me?"
"Because they have learned to see goodness and beauty everywhere," said the Master.
"Why don't I see goodness and beauty everywhere?"
"Because you cannot see outside of you what you fail to see inside."”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Projection
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Happiness, Beauty

“We have now completed both the spiritual and the temporal government, that is, the divine and the paternal authority and obedience. But here now we go forth from our house among our neighbors to learn how we should live with one another, every one himself toward his neighbor. Therefore God and government are not included in this commandment nor is the power to kill, which they have taken away. For God has delegated His authority to punish evil-doers to the government instead of parents, who aforetime (as we read in Moses) were required to bring their own children to judgment and sentence them to death. Therefore, what is here forbidden is forbidden to the individual in his relation to any one else, and not to the government.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/catechism/web/cat-07.html The Large Catechism by Martin Luther, Translated by F. Bente and W.H.T. Dau Published in: Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921) pp. 565-773, (1529)

Death, God, Children, Parent

“What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Source: Tomorrow Is Now (1963), p. 134

World, Science, Future

“[I've changed a bit here - see youtube video "Jordan Peterson - Are YOU Antisocial?!"] We have these shared frames of reference, like when we're playing monopoly. Children at three learn to play games, which means that they learn to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the emotional states of other people. And that means they can play. And that's what everyone does when they're out in the world. That's why we can go about our daily business - we all know the rules. That's why we can sit in the same room without fighting each other. Because you're smart and socially conscious, you can walk into a room full of people and know what to do. If you're civilized and social you can just do it, and you can predict what all the other primates are up to, and they won't kill you. That's what it means to be part of the same tribe. People are very peculiar creatures and God only knows what they're up to. As long as they're playing the same game that you are, you don't have to know what they're up to, and you can predict what they're going to do because you understand their motivational states. And so, part of the building and constructing of higher order moral goals is the establishment of joint frames of reference that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously. Not all shared frames of reference can manage that. There's a small subset of them that are optimized so that not only can multiple people play them, but multiple people can play them, AND enjoy them, AND do it repeatedly across a long period of time. So it's iterability that partly defines the utility of a higher order moral structure, and that is not arbitrary. It's an emergent property of biological interactions. It's not arbitrary at all, because a lot of what's constraining your games is your motivational substructure and those ancient circuits that are status oriented, which operate within virtually every animal. Virtually every animal has a status counter. Creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies. The reason they do that is because that works. It's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence. It's not just an epiphenomena. It's the real thing. So your environment is fundamentally dominance hierarchy, plus God only knows where you are. And that's order and chaos. And part of the reason people fight to preserve their dominance hierarchies is because it's better to be a slave who knows what the hell is going on than someone who is thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night. And that's the difference between order and chaos. And we like order better than chaos and it's no wonder. And invite a little chaos in for entertainment now and then, but it has to be done voluntarily, and generally you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure. You're willing to fool around on the fringes a little bit, but you know, when the going gets serious you're pretty much likely to bail out.”

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

Concepts

God, Children, People, World

“All that I know I learned after I was thirty.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

As quoted in And Madly Teach : A Layman Looks at Public School Education (1949) by Mortimer Brewster Smith, p. 27
Post-Prime Ministerial

“There at the moment in Honfleur... Boudin and Jongkind are here; we get on marvelously. There's lots to be learned and nature begins to grow beautiful... I shall tell you I'm sending a flower picture to the exhibition at Rouen; there are very beautiful flowers at present.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter to Frédéric Bazille; as cited in: Edward B. Henning, Cleveland Museum of Art. Creativity in art and science, 1860-1960. (1987), p. 95
1850 - 1870

Beauty, Flowers, Nature

“Learning's always a painful process.”

Luc Besson (1959) French film director, writer, and producer

Lucy (2014)

Pain

“MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up--morally, mentally and spiritually--and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man's economy, and his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging--for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Mr. Muhammad teaches that as soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man's full potential will explode and he will surpass the white man.
Playboy interview, regarding the ambition of the Black Muslims
Attributed

Love, Men, Hate, People

“He that knew all that ever Learning writ,
Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.”

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer

The Emperor of the Moon, Act III, sc. iii.

“I think a label like "avant-garde" defeats itself. You learn to have avant-garde exhibitions. The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats the purpose of avant-garde, because it's already formalised and ritualised.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Source: The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 301

Thinking

“How many rivers must we cross before we learn that the flood is rising high
And the bridges all have burned
Each time another dream is washed into the sea
It's another piece of you
It's another piece of me.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Who's Gonna Stop the Rain
Not That Kind (2000)

Dreams, Time, Sea

“And every business can take action. All the business leaders who are here and our global economy companies have a responsibility to make sure that their supply chains, stretching into the far corners of the globe, are free of forced labor. […] Every faith community can take action as well, by educating their congregations, by joining in coalitions that are bound by a love of God and a concern for the oppressed. And like that Good Samaritan on the road to Jericho, we can’t just pass by, indifferent. We’ve got to be moved by compassion. We’ve got to bind up the wounds. Let’s come together around a simple truth -- that we are our brother’s keepers and we are our sister’s keepers. And finally, every citizen can take action: by learning more; by going to the website that we helped create -- SlaveryFootprint. org; by speaking up and insisting that the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the products we buy are made free of forced labor; by standing up against the degradation and abuse of women.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012, Remarks at Clinton Global Initiative (September 2012)

Love, Women, God, Truth

“What is a charitable heart? It is a heart which is burning with love for the whole creation, for men, for the birds, for the beasts … for all creatures. He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes his heart; a heart which is softened and can no longer bear to see or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain being inflicted upon a creature. That is why such a man never ceases to pray for the animals … [He is] … moved by the infinite pity which reigns in the hearts of those who are becoming united with God.”

Isaac of Nineveh (640–700) Eastern Orthodox saint

Mystic Treatises, cited in Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1976), [//books.google.it/books?id=dxqvWwPSCSwC&pg=PA111 p. 111]; also cited and discussed in A. M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding (1978), p. 85. Quoted in Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (1994), [//books.google.it/books?id=ESTjQYS_8hMC&pg=PA56 p. 56].

Love, Men, God, Pain

“And if there is one thing that he and this year’s anniversary should teach us, if there’s one lesson I hope that Malia and Sasha and young people everywhere learn from this day, it’s that with enough effort, and enough empathy, and enough perseverance, and enough courage, people who love their country can change it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit at Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on April 10, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/10/remarks-president-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit 2014

Love, People, Hope, Courage

“In our society today, when we teach the righteous way of life based upon the Theory of judo which embodies the principles of continuous improvement of society, then this righteous life provides a basis of definite proof of this principle and unifies the peoples' way of thinking. Various religious and learned points of view are then made abundantly clear.”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

Kodokan Magazine (1974)

Life, People, Way, Thinking

“The ultimate goal of all visual artistic activity is construction! Architects, painters and sculptors must learn again to know and understand the multi-faceted form of building in its entirety as well as its parts. Only then will they of their own accord fill their works with the architectonic spirit they have lost in the art of the salon. Let us establish a new guild of craftsmen without the presumption of class distinctions building a wall of arrogance between craftsmen and artists. Together let us call for, devise and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form: architecture, sculpture and painting.”

Walter Gropius (1883–1969) German architect (1883-1969) and founder of the Bauhaus School

Manifesto (1919)

Art, Understanding, Future, Parting

“We learn, when we learn, only from experience, and then we only learn from our mistakes. Our successes only serve to reinforce our superstitions.”

Arthur Jones (inventor) (1926–2007) American inventor

The New High Intensity Training (2004)

Success

“The idea of any social obligation […] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid.
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A ideia de uma obrigação social qualquer [...] só essa ideia me estorva os pensamentos de um dia, e às vezes é desde a mesma véspera que me preocupo, e durmo mal, e o caso real, quando se dá, é absolutamente insignificante, não justifica nada; e o caso repete-se e eu não aprendo a aprender.

Idea, Sleep

“In-depth learning means learning as much about a topic as possible – learning for the sake of knowledge and understanding itself as opposed to learning for the sake of passing a test with high grades or trying to impress people.”

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

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 233

People, Understanding, Knowledge

Quotes about learning page 8

Quotes about learning
page 8