"Fall of a City"
Selected Poems (1941)
Context: All the lessons learned, unlearned;
The young, who learned to read, now blind
Their eyes with an archaic film;
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey`s bray;
These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses
On the high door of a skull and in some corner
Of an irrefrangible eye
Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.
“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn.”
“5085. 'Tis harder to unlearn than learn.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“The most necessary learning is that which unlearns evil. ”
Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1893).
“The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.”
War Memoirs (1938)
War Memoirs
“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
“When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, "Not to unlearn what you have learned."”
Antisthenes, 4.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 6: The Cynics
