Learning Quotes

“To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters.”

“I hourly learn a doctrine of obedience.”

“Experience is by industry achieved, And perfected by the swift course of time.”

“For my own part, I shall be glad to learn of noble men.”

“Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.”

“In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”

“I shall the effect of this good lesson keeps as watchman to my heart.”

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”

“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”

“The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.”

“A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.”

“Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”

“The villany you teach me I shall execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

“The things taught in schools & colleges are not an education but the means of education.”

“He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.”

“The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart.”

“When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again.”

“Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.”

“There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.”

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

“Genius Borrows nobly.”

“The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.”

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.”