Quottes: Learning

A collection of quotes on various topics. The sentence in bold face is a plain statement of the quote that follows.

Learning
The public must be prepared for new ideas.
Learning 209 …no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it though anticipatory glimpses. Eiseley, The Star Thrower

Belief in the liberating value of learning.
Learning 272 …cruel refutation of the confident belief in the liberating value and effect of learning, which in the Enlightenment began its victorious march through the Western world. Bracher, The German Dictatorship.

He listened and learned rather than spoke.
Learning 16 ...as always, he was listening and learning more than speaking. Sorenson, Kennedy

Today I see things that in my thirty years in the profession I overlooked.
Learning 161 I am not ashamed to confess…that today I can see things in patients that I overlooked for thirty years in my hospital wards. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).

Learning is growth, not arriving.
Learning 664 …learning was a process of growth…never a process of arriving…. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).

Whatever he saw, he asked why and how.
Learning 135 Everything he [Leonardo] saw made him ask why and how. Clark, Civilization.

Learned people after much toil admit they know nothing; knowing nothing comes naturally to me without any toil.
Learning 472 Croce: When [his friend] had finished reading it he returned the book to me, remarking that he had acquired the proud conviction of being “the most learned of philologists”; for the latter arrive at the conclusion that they know nothing, as the result of exhausting toil; while he knew nothing without any effort at all, simply as a generous gift of nature. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Benedetto Croce.

Most of what we learn in life is learned in periods of enforced silence.
Learning 119 …most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing.

We exchanged experiences and we all learned something.
Learning 782 …we exchanged our experiences and all learned something. Emerson, English Traits.

Philosophers, bards and actors have done something that some day I will do.
Learning 67 Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. Emerson, The American Scholar.

No one can learn without preparation for learning.
Learning 313 No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. Emerson, Spiritual Laws.

What we do not see we are not prepared to see; when the mind is ripe we see.
Learning 313 Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. Emerson, Spiritual Laws.

Put what he has learned in many different forms and apply it to many different subjects.
Learning 20 Let him…put what he has just learned into a hundred forms and apply it to as many different subjects, to see if he has yet rightly grasped it and has made it his own… Montaigne, Selected Essays.

If we learn it by rote, we do not know it.
Learning 22 To know by rote is not to know. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

Knowing something is not the same as applying it.
Learning 41 He who puts them [my lessons] in practice has profited more by them than he who merely knows them. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

He does not merely recite, he does.
Learning 42 He will not so much recite his lesson as do it. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

They will gain no understanding of valor by reading words; they will learn from acting.
Learning 42 Zeuxidamus, to one who asked him why the Lacedemonians did not draw up a written account of their rules of valor and give them to their young men to read, replied that it was because they wanted to accustom them to action, not to words. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

I learned to relish science and duty freely and without constraint.
Learning 49 For he [my father] had been advised to make me relish science and duty by an unforced will and by my own desire, and to educate my mind in all liberty and gentleness without any severity or constraint. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

Man learns first by imitation.
Learning 7 …he [man] is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. Aristotle, Poetics. Adler and VanDoren, eds. Great Treasury of Western Thought.

I am slow to learn and to forget.
Learning 194 Lincoln: “I am slow to learn, and slow to forget…my mind is like a piece of steel— Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years