On Learning

‘The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.’
— Muhammad Ali

‘It is what we think we know that keeps us from learning.’
— Chester Barnard

‘It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.’
— Jacob Bronowski

‘To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.’
— John Burroughs

‘In order to learn one must change one’s mind.’
— Orson Scott Card

‘That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.’
— Thomas Carlyle

‘The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.’
— G. K. Chesterton

‘Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.’
— Winston Churchill

‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts.’
— Winston Churchill

‘If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes; and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.’
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘He who stops being better stops being good.’
— Oliver Cromwell

‘To develop a complete mind, study the science of art, study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.’
— Leonardo Da Vinci

‘The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.’
— Albert Einstein

‘Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning today is young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.’
— Henry Ford

‘One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.’
— John W. Gardner

‘There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure—all your life.’
— John W. Gardner

‘Learning is its own exceeding great reward.’
— William Hazlitt

‘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

‘Belief gets in the way of learning.’
— Robert Heinlein

‘Much learning does not teach understanding.’
— Heraclitus

‘In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.’
— Eric Hoffer

‘He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.’
— Joseph Joubert

‘Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.’
— Arthur Koestler

‘The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.’
— John Lubbock

‘A person who can create ideas worthy of note is a person who has learned much from others.’
— Konosuke Matsushita

‘I am still learning.’
— Michaelangelo

‘The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.’
— John Stuart Mill

‘I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.’
— Pablo Picasso

‘Some people never learn anything because they understand everything too soon.’
— Alexander Pope

‘A little learning is a dangerous thing.’
— Alexander Pope

‘It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.’
— John Saxe

‘Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.’
— Socrates

‘If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.’
— Benedict de Spinoza

‘To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.’
— Robert Louis Stephenson

‘Man’s capacities have never been measured, nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedent, so little has been tried.’
— Henry David Thoreau

‘I said that an expert was a fella who was afraid to learn anything new because then he wouldn’t be an expert any more.’
— Harry S. Truman

‘The illiterate of future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn.’
— Alvin Toffler

‘One learns through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.’
— Mark Twain

‘We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.’
— Mark Twain