Learning Quotations

As the title suggests, this category contains quotations dealing with learning and education.

Showing 1 through 36 of 48 quotations in this category.

"It should not, and need not, be the purpose of a science teacher to preach atheism or even skepticism about any religious doctrine, but if such should be the result of his teaching in one, two or even a half-dozen of his students, that has nothing to do with his purposes. His purpose is to teach the science as it is currently understood. A semester of study of the weather and meteorology may result in a student's new realization that the god Thor does not cause thunder and lightning. We might even say, so much the better! But the science teacher's purpose is not to rid the student of such belief; his or her purpose is to teach the science about the weather."

-Hal Tritz

"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination."

-Denis Diderot

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

-Albert Einstein

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

-Confucius

"Knowledge is not a commodity to be traded between expert and novice. Rather, it is a construction of ideas negotiated by the learner in a social setting."

-Rosamar Garcia

"Belief gets in the way of learning."

-Robert Heinlein

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers."

-Kahlil Gibran

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."

-Anatole France

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think--rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men."

-Bill Beattie

"Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn - when they do, which isn't often - on their own, the hard way."

-Robert Heinlein

"He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes. But he who never asks a question remains a fool forever."

-Tom J. Connelly

"The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things -- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit."

-Samuel Johnson

"Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."

-William Safire's Great Rules of Writing

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

-Albert Einstein

"We are students of words: we are shut up in a schools and colleges and recitation-rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives."

-Robert M. Hutchins

"The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."

-John F. Kennedy

"The real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions."

-Bishop Creighton

"He helps others most, who shows them how to help themselves."

-A. P. Gouthey

"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving."

-Russell Green

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."

-Will Durant

"I think college administrators should encourage students to urinate on walls and bushes, because then when students from another college come sniffing around, they'll know this is someone else's territory."

-Jack Handey

"If you want to be the most popular person in your class, whenever the professor pauses in his lecture, just let out a big snort and say "How do you figger that!" real loud. Then lean back and sort of smirk."

-Jack Handey

"But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly."

-Plato

"If little else, the brain is an educational toy."

-Tom Robbins

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."

-Oscar Wilde

"What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did."

-unknown

"Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity."

-Nancy Astor

"Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune."

-Jim Rohn

"Experience is a good school, but the fees are high."

-Heinrich Heine

"Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."

-Albert Einstein

"To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject."

-Albert Einstein

"You have too high an expectation of the commercial system. You expect that commercial education will mean that your kids can get a great education. I expect that, if parents are given the opportunity to send their kid to any school, and any school can get funding, 60% of kids will end up at the Pepsi McSchool of Jesus."

-Pxtl, on Slashdot.org

"The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms."

-Galen

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."

-Malcolm S. Forbes