“Learn what life requires,
How little nature needs!”
Book IV, line 377 (tr. E. Ridley).
Compare: "But would [men] think with how small allowance / Untroubled nature doth herself suffice", Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, B. I, C. 9, st. 15.
Pharsalia
Original
Discite, quam parvo liceat producere vitam, Et quantum natura petat.
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Marcus Annaeus Lucanus 58
Roman poet 39–65Related quotes
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 160
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)
Context: All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned. These are the things you already know:
“What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Context: ... education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or the viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their energy in doing it.
As quoted in "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon; containing a Narrative of the Wars of Kentucke" in The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke (1784) by John Filson
Context: Situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.
Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 5: Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
“One shouldn't learn more than what one absolutely needs against life.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
[Physics in 100 years, Physics Today, 69, 4, 10.1063/PT.3.3137, April 2016, 32–39] (quote from p. 38)
