“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

"The Making of a Scientist," p. 19
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

The Warrior is Silent

Source: The Alchemist

Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1923), I, p. 56; as quoted in "Wittgenstein versus Mauthner: Two critiques of language, two mysticisms" (2007) by Elena Nájera http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-alws/article/view/2659/3042

As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" - Theosophy Vol. 26, No. 8 (June 1938) http://www.wisdomworld.org/setting/bruno.html

"Education for Independent Thought" in The New York Times, 5 October 1952. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954)
1950s
Context: It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community. These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not—or at least not in the main—through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

Police Shootings
1980s–1990s, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays (1987)

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time