“If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.”

Last update July 5, 2022. History

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George Bernard Shaw 413
Irish playwright 1856–1950

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“Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.”

Robert Kraft (astronomer) (1927–2015) American astronomer

Interview of Robert Kraft by Patrick McCray on August 1-2, 2002 http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/25490.html, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics.

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“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

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“You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

As quoted in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1935) by Dale Carnegie, p. 117; also paraphrased as "You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself." Attributions are found as early as 1882.
Attributed
Source: Google Books link https://books.google.com/books?id=h70_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA476&dq=You+cannot+teach+a+man+anything;+you+can+only+help+him+find+it+within+himself&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI39Gmss_gyAIVRNRjCh1Q2wGN#v=onepage&q=%22You%20cannot%20teach%22&f=false

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