Learning Quotes

Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe. - Alfred North Whitehead, address delivered to the Training College Association of England, quoted in Bulletin of The American Association of University Professors, November 1923, Volume IX, Number 7





You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. - Clay P. Bedford


Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. - Henry L. Doherty


I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. - Eartha Kitt


It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. - Attributed to Harry S Truman


A single conversation with a wise man during the eating of a meal, is better than ten years' mere study of books. - Chinese Proverb  [Quoted in Justus Doolittle, A Vocabulary and Hand-Book of the Chinese Language, Romanized in the Mandarin Dialect, "Metaphorical and Proverbial Sentences," 1872. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled. - Paul Eldridge


When the student is ready, the master appears. - Buddhist Proverb


Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. - Vilfredo Pareto


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


Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes


You learn something every day if you pay attention. - Ray LeBlond


Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. - Alexander Pope


Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. - Thomas Huxley


Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. - Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928


I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. - Abraham Lincoln


The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. - Mohammed


Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. - Chinese Proverb


All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. - Winston Churchill


The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live. - Mortimer Adler


There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. - Willa Cather


There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything. - George Herbert Palmer


Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. - Vernon Howard


Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.




No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world. - Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle


Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. - Henry Ford


I find four great classes of students:
The dumb who stay dumb;
The dumb who become wise;
The wise who go dumb;
The wise who remain wise.
- Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time. - Russell Hoban


The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. - Antisthenes


Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. - Mark Twain


It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. - Alvin Toffler





You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. - George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara: A Discussion in Three Long Acts {Act III, Andrew Undershaft; performed 1905, published 1907}


I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. - Dudley Field Malone


Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. - Thomas Szasz


You're not dumb, or stupid — just thoroughly wrong. - Teacher extraordinaire, Mr Jerry Kopke, said to his students, c.1980s


I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets. - Bernard Keble Sandwell


Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later. - Dana Stewart Scott


His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken. - H.G. Wells





Learning without thought is labor lost. - Confucius


The pupil can only educate himself. Teachers are the custodians of apparatus upon which he himself must turn and twist to acquire the excellencies that distinguish the better from the poorer of God's vessels. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don’t need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. - Lesley Conger


The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. - Henry S. Haskins


We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself. - Lloyd Alexander


You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way. - Marvin Minsky


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





Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back. - Chinese Proverb


People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong. - Bill Vaughan