Quotes about studying
page 8

Joseph Beuys photo
Adolphe Quetelet photo
Benjamin Franklin photo

“Marriage is the proper Remedy. It is the most natural State of Man and therefore the State in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness… [W]hen Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good… [Y]ou should prefer old Women to young ones.”

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

Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/51-fra.html (25 June 1745)
Epistles

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“People say, “Artist, study nature!” But it is no small matter to develop what is noble out of what is common, beauty out of what lacks form.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Man sagt: „Studire, Künstler, die Natur!”
Es ist aber keine Kleinigkeit, aus dem Gemeinen das Edle, aus der Unform das Schöne zu entwickeln.
Maxim 191, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood photo

“Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not a single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood.”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Breaking Down the Wall of Silence (Abbruch der Schweigemauer) (1990)

Mark Ames photo
Philip Warren Anderson photo
William Bateson photo

“The subjective element in geological studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists. One considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.”

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen (1904–1983) Dutch geologist

Source: "The Scientific Character of Geology," 1961, p. 453; quoted in: Robert Woodtli (1964), Methods of Prospection for Chromite, p. 80

Paul Klee photo
Joanne B. Freeman photo
Robert A. Dahl photo
N. Gregory Mankiw photo
John Ogilby photo

“Various Arts by study might be wrought
Up to their height.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Georgicks

Jonah Lehrer photo
D. V. Gundappa photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Kent Hovind photo
Emile Coué photo
William Trufant Foster photo
Kenneth Arrow photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Charles Boarman photo

“My dear Father, Charley wrote you in his letter to his Aunt Laura thanking you for your kindness in sending us a nice Christmas present. You must not think because I have not written you myself before this that I appreciated your kindness less. I have been so troubled with pains and weakness in my arm and hand as to be almost useless at times. I think it was nursing so much when the children were sick. I was so relieved when Anna's note to Charly arrived yesterday telling Frankie was better. It would have been dreadful for Mother to have gone out west at this miserable season of the year. I was wretchedly uneasy. I do hope poor Franky will get along nicely now. It will make him much more careful about exposing himself having had this severe attack. Charley received the enclosed letters Anna sent from Sister Eliza and Toad[? ]. I was very glad to get them. It is quite refreshing to read Sister Eliza's letters. They are so cheerful and happy. I had a letter from her on Friday. This Custom House investigating committee is attracting a great deal of attention and time here. It holds its sessions at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Mr. Broome was up on Tuesday evening until ten o'clock but was not called upon. It is very slow. He has been for three weeks passed preparing the statement for those summoned from the Public Stores. Mr. Broome sends Laura a paper to look at—The Fisk tragedy. What is Nora doing with herself this winter. She might write to me sometimes. Give much love to Mother. Ask her for her receipt for getting fat. I would like to gain some myself. It is so much nicer to grow fleshy as you advance in life than to shrivel and dry up. The children are all well and growing very fast. Lloyd has to study very hard this year. His studies are quite difficult. I suppose Charley Harris is working hard too. Mr. Broome sent you a paper with the Navy Register in this week. I received your papers and often Richard calls and gets them. I must close. Mr. Broome and children join me in love to you, Mother, Laura, Anna, Nora, Charly & all.
With much love,
Your devoted child, Mary Jane
I enclose Nancy letter which was written some time ago.”

Charles Boarman (1795–1879) US Navy Rear Admiral

Mary Jane Boarman in a Sunday letter to her father (January 21, 1872)
The people mentioned in Mary Jane's letter were her children Lloyd, Charley, and Nancy; her husband, William Henry Broome; her sisters Eliza, Anna, Laura, and Nora; her brother Frankie; and her nephew frontier physician Dr. Charles "Charley" Harris, son of her sister Susan.
John Broome and Rebecca Lloyd: Their Descendants and Related Families, 18th to 21st Centuries (2009)

Georges Seurat photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Nicomachus photo

“Plato, too, at the end of the thirteenth book of the Laws, to which some give the title The Philosopher… adds: "Every diagram, system of numbers, every scheme of harmony, and every law of the movement of the stars, ought to appear one to him who studies rightly; and what we say will properly appear if one studies all things looking to one principle, for there will be seen to be one bond for all these things, and if anyone attempts philosophy in any other way he must call on Fortune to assist him. For there is never a path without these… The one who has attained all these things in the way I describe, him I for my part call wisest, and this I maintain through thick and thin." For it is clear that these studies are like ladders and bridges that carry our minds from things apprehended by sense and opinion to those comprehended by the mind and understanding, and from those material, physical things, our foster-brethren known to us from childhood, to the things with which we are unacquainted, foreign to our senses, but in their immateriality and eternity more akin to our souls, and above all to the reason which is in our souls.”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

Footnote<!--3, p.185-->: The Epinomis, from which Nicomachus here quotes 991 D ff., is now recognized as not genuinely Platonic. Nicomachus doubtless cited the passage from memory, for he does not give it exactly...
Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

Don Tapscott photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
Andrew Dickson White photo
Dennis M. Ritchie photo
Ignatius of Loyola photo

“I have studied at Barcelona, at Salamanca, at Alcala, at Paris; what have I learned? The language of doubt; but in me there was no harbor for doubt. Jesus came, and my trust in God has grown by the doubts of men.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 599.

Henri Poincaré photo

“Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.”

Les mathématiciens n'étudient pas des objets, mais des relations entre les objets ; il leur est donc indifférent de remplacer ces objets par d'autres, pourvu que les relations ne changent pas. La matière ne leur importe pas, la forme seule les intéresse.
Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. II: Dover abridged edition (1952), p. 20

Donald A. Norman photo

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

William Foote Whyte photo
Niccolo Machiavelli photo
Thomas Shapiro photo
Robert Maynard Hutchins photo
Nadine Gordimer photo
Simone Weil photo

“Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

Mary Parker Follett photo

“The study of human relations in business and the study of the technology of operating are bound up together.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Attributed to Mary Parker Follett in: Business: The Ultimate Resource, 2001. p. 904.
Attributed from postum publications

Thomas Frank photo
William Paley photo

“Wanton, and, what is worse, studied cruelty to brutes, is certainly wrong.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Vol. I, Book II, Ch. XI.
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785)

Samuel Bowles photo
Kenneth Arrow photo

“We will also assume in the present study that individual values are taken as data and are not capable of being altered by the nature of the decision process itself”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 7

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Thomas Eakins photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Thomas Eakins photo
Edward Hopper photo

“There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Alfred Barr & Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition Museum of Modern Art New York 1933
1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Jacob Bronowski photo
Edwin Thompson Jaynes photo
Everett Dean Martin photo

“Well, that is one of the three foundations of learning: see much, study much, suffer much.”

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book I: The Book of Three (1964), Chapter 1

Enoch Powell photo

“Now, at present Britain has no V. A. T., and the questions whether this new tax should be introduced, how it should be levied, and what should be its scope, would be matters of debate in the country and in Parliament. The essence of parliamentary democracy lies in the power to debate and impose taxation: it is the vital principle of the British House of Commons, from which all other aspects of its sovereignty ultimately derive. With Britain in the community, one important element of taxation would be taken automatically, necessarily and permanently out of the hands of the House of Commons…Those matters which sovereign parliaments debate and decide must be debated and decided not by the British House of Commons but in some other place, and by some other body, and debated and decided once for the whole Community…it is a fact that the British Parliament and its paramount authority occupies a position in relation to the British nation which no other elective assembly in Europe possesses. Take parliament out of the history of England and that history itself becomes meaningless. Whole lifetimes of study cannot exhaust the reasons why this fact has come to be, but fact it is, so that the British nation could not imagine itself except with and through its parliament. Consequently the sovereignty of our parliament is something other for us than what your assemblies are for you. What is equally significant, your assemblies, unlike the British Parliament, are the creation of deliberate political acts, and most of recent political acts. The notion that a new sovereign body can be created is therefore as familiar to you as it is repugnant, not to say unimaginable, to us. This deliberate, and recent, creation of sovereign assemblies on the continent is in turn an aspect of the fact that the continent is familiar, and familiar in the recent past, with the creation of nation states themselves. Four of the six members of the Community came into existence as such no more than a century or a century and a half ago – within the memory of two lifetimes.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Lyons (12 February 1971), from The Common Market: The Case Against (Elliot Right Way Books, 1971), pp. 65-68.
1970s

K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera photo

“Intellectuals tend to spend too much of their valuable time in study, critical analysis and debate. They usually have little or no time for practice.”

K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera (1919–2006) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

"Is Buddhism a Theory of a Philosophy?"
What Buddhists Believe (1993)

Fritjof Capra photo

“The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 3; As cited in: Michael C. Jackson (2000) Systems Approaches to Management. p. 5.

“In similar fashion we may approach the personality and induce the individual to reveal his way of organizing experience by giving him a field (objects, materials, experiences) with relatively little structure and cultural patterning so that the personality can project upon that plastic field his way of seeing life, his meanings, significances, patterns, and especially his feelings, Thus we elicit a projection of the individual's private world, because he has to organize the field, interpret the material, and react affectively to it. More specifically, a projection method for study of personality involves the presentation of a stimulus-situation designed or chosen because it will mean to the subject, not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be “objective”), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization. The subject then will respond to his meaning of the presented stimulus-situation by some form of action and feeling that is expressive of his personality.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

Source: Projective methods for the study of personality (1939), p. 402-403; As cited in: Edwin Inglee Megargee, Charles Donald Spielberger (1992) Personality assessment in America: a retrospective on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Personality Assessment. p. 20-21

Thomas Bradwardine photo
Mata Amritanandamayi photo
Gancho Tsenov photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Orson Scott Card photo
James M. Buchanan photo
Gustave Courbet photo
Stephen Corry photo
Tjalling Koopmans photo
Georges Bataille photo

“Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.
The same aberration is found among the Turks (Volga Turks, Turks of Central Asia), who consider it immortal to show their nude feet and whoe ven go to bed in stockings.
Nothing similar can be cited from classical antiquity (apart from the use of very high soles in tragedies). The most prudish Roman matrons constantly allowed their nude toes to be seen. On the other hand, modesty concerning feet developed excessively in the modern ea and only started to disappear in the nineteenth century. M. Salomon Reinarch has studied this development in detail in the article entitled Pieds pudiques [Modest Feet], insisting on the role of Spain, where women's feet have been the object of most dreaded anxiety and thus were the cause of crimes. The simple fact of allowing the shod foot to be seen, jutting up from under a skirt, was regarded as indecent. Under no circumstances was it possible to touch the foot of a woman.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, p.21-22

David Mamet photo

“The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists…. The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em. ] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.'
The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

, Marcellin Berthelot, Ch. Em. Ruelle, "The Alchemists of Egypt and Greece," Art. VIII. (Jan. 1893) in The Edinburgh Review (Jan.-Apr. 1893) Vol. 177, pp. 208-209. https://books.google.com/books?id=GuvRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA208

Philip Melanchthon photo
Mao Zedong photo

“Recently there has been a falling off in ideological and political work among students and intellectuals, and some unhealthy tendencies have appeared. Some people seem to think that there is no longer any need to concern oneself with politics or with the future of the motherland and the ideals of mankind. It seems as if Marxism was once all the rage but is currently not so much in fashion. To counter these tendencies, we must strengthen our ideological and political work. Both students and intellectuals should study hard. In addition to the study of their specialized subjects, they must make progress both ideologically and politically, which means that they should study Marxism, current events and politics. Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul […] All departments and organizations should shoulder their responsibilities in ideological and political work. This applies to the Communist Party, the Youth League, government departments in charge of this work, and especially to heads of educational institutions and teachers.”

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

Chapter 12 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch12.htm; originally published in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" (27 February 1957), 1st pocket ed., pp. 43-44
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)

Aldo Leopold photo
Manuel Castells photo
Subramanian Swamy photo

“I feel that only those who have been oppressed by the society and have been forced to live a backward life should given reservations. If Muslims want to study, then should be given scholarships, good schools, But Muslims and Christians can't have reservation as they have ruled our country.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

On giving reservations to Muslims and Christians, as quoted in "Muslims and Christians shouldn't ask for reservation, says Subramanian Swamy" http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-muslims-and-christians-shouldn-t-ask-for-reservation-says-subramanian-swamy-1995886, DNA India (16 June 2014)
2011-2014

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Joseph M. Juran photo
Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch photo

“Weissenbruch to Anton Mauve: He [ Vincent van Gogh ] is drawing damn well, I could paint after his studies.”

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

version in original Dutch, Weissenbruch tegen Anton Mauve: Hij teekent verdomd goed, ik zou naar zijn studies kunnen werken.
a remark to Anton Mauve, who asked Weissenbruch to visit Vincent van Gogh and see his work
Source: J. H. Weissenbruch', (n.d.), p. 44, note 1

Daniel Tammet photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

“Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

"A Generalization of Weyl's Theory of the Electromagnetic and Gravitational Fields" in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A99 (1921), p. 108

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“The challenge of Christian critics impelled me to make a study of Hinduism and find out what is living and what is dead in it. My pride as a Hindu, roused by the enterprise and eloquence of Swami Vivekananda, was deeply hurt by the treatment accorded to Hinduism in missionary institutions.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Source: Donald Mackenzie Brown The Nationalist Movement: Indian Political Thought from Ranade to Bhave http://books.google.co.in/books?id=WgwpwG_XspsC&pg=PA153, University of California Press, 1970, p.153.

Francis Bacon photo
Francis Bacon photo
Plutarch photo

“Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

51 Alcibiades
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

“What might we learn about God and ourselves if our Bible study group gathered outside to stare at the stars in silence?”

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Jack Kirby photo
James Frazer photo