Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
- Gandhi
I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
- Socrates
Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do.
- Goethe
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
- John Powell
You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei
The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience.
- Carl Rogers
I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
- Henry David Thoreau
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
- Albert Einstein
It takes two to speak the truth, -- one to speak, and another to hear.
- Henry David Thoreau
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.
- Marcel Proust, French novelist
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
- William Arthur Ward
The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.
- John Holt
Some are born with knowledge, some derive it from study, and some acquire it only after a painful realization of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some study with a natural ease, some from a desire for advantages, and some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing.
- Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius)
What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.
- Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius)
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.
- Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), British novelist. The Journals of Arnold Bennett (1932), entry for 18 March 1897.
Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death.
- Confucius
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
- Thomas Calyle, Scottish essayist and historian
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there's no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
- Rudolph Flesch
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
- Dudley Field Malone
If anything concerns me, it's the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn't fit into bubbles.
-Michele Forman, 2001 Teacher of the Year, quoted by the Associated Press.
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
- Maria Montessori
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. . . . No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
- Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Socrates, The Republic, bk. 7, sct. 536
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist, poet. Jack Cade, in King Henry VI, pt. 2, act 4, sc. 7
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born U.S. physicist. Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California
The most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to provide them with a sense of coherence in their studies; that is, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn . . . [In modern secular education, the] curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.
- Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity
Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.
- Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, 1861 - 1947.
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
- Adolf Hitler
Using behaviorism to control learning is like using an umbrella to control the weather.
- Steve Nordby
School administrators intone that "in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom." That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.
- Susan Ohanian, teacher and writer, "There's Only One True Technique for Good Discipline," in Who's in Charge? (1994)
I hate quotations.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
- Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)
...Perhaps half of all learning ability was squelched in the earliest elementary grades, where children found out that there exist predetermined and unyielding "right answers" for everything, that following instructions is what really counts and, most surprisingly, that the whole business of education is mostly dull and painful.
- George B. Leonard, journalist and educational consultant, Education and Ecstasy (1968)
Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
- Gautama Buddha
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
- Cicero (Quoted by Montaigne)
The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, multilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abtruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.
- Jules Henry, Culture Against Man
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
- Margaret Meade
The ability to learn is older -- as it is also more widespread -- than is the ability to teach.
- Margaret Meade
I hope to live to see the day when public education becomes as accountable to parents as private education, and the day when students who want to learn can be matched with teachers who want to teach without parents paying directly out of their pockets. Until then, I will continue to teach public school while entrusting my children's education to a private one. And heaven help America's children if all of us cynical teachers abandon the public schools, leaving public education in the hands of those who believe it is working well.
- Jerry Jesness, Texas special education teeacher, in the April 6 issue of Intellectual Capital.
The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The above quotes began as a list gifted to me by someone who gave me permission to publish it. The below quotes were added later, some from signature blocks on e-mail lists or public forums.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
--Robert Frost
No bird soars too high when he soars with his own wings.
-William Blake
"The beaten path is the safest, but the traffic's terrible."
-Jeff Taylor
"Love truth, but pardon error"
- Voltaire (French philosopher and writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
- Bertrand Russell
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-Helen Keller
To educate a child perfectly requires profounder thought, greater wisdom, than to govern a state.
-- W.E. Channing
- Gandhi
I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
- Socrates
Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
- Winston Churchill
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do.
- Goethe
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
- John Powell
You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei
The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience.
- Carl Rogers
I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
- Henry David Thoreau
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
- Albert Einstein
It takes two to speak the truth, -- one to speak, and another to hear.
- Henry David Thoreau
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.
- Marcel Proust, French novelist
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
- William Arthur Ward
The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.
- John Holt
Some are born with knowledge, some derive it from study, and some acquire it only after a painful realization of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some study with a natural ease, some from a desire for advantages, and some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing.
- Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius)
What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.
- Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius)
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.
- Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), British novelist. The Journals of Arnold Bennett (1932), entry for 18 March 1897.
Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death.
- Confucius
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
- Thomas Calyle, Scottish essayist and historian
Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.
- Arthur C. Clarke
Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there's no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
- Rudolph Flesch
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
- Dudley Field Malone
If anything concerns me, it's the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn't fit into bubbles.
-Michele Forman, 2001 Teacher of the Year, quoted by the Associated Press.
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
- Maria Montessori
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. . . . No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
- Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Socrates, The Republic, bk. 7, sct. 536
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist, poet. Jack Cade, in King Henry VI, pt. 2, act 4, sc. 7
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born U.S. physicist. Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California
The most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to provide them with a sense of coherence in their studies; that is, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn . . . [In modern secular education, the] curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.
- Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity
Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.
- Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, 1861 - 1947.
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
- Adolf Hitler
Using behaviorism to control learning is like using an umbrella to control the weather.
- Steve Nordby
School administrators intone that "in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom." That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.
- Susan Ohanian, teacher and writer, "There's Only One True Technique for Good Discipline," in Who's in Charge? (1994)
I hate quotations.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
- Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)
...Perhaps half of all learning ability was squelched in the earliest elementary grades, where children found out that there exist predetermined and unyielding "right answers" for everything, that following instructions is what really counts and, most surprisingly, that the whole business of education is mostly dull and painful.
- George B. Leonard, journalist and educational consultant, Education and Ecstasy (1968)
Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
- Gautama Buddha
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
- Cicero (Quoted by Montaigne)
The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, multilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abtruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.
- Jules Henry, Culture Against Man
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
- Margaret Meade
The ability to learn is older -- as it is also more widespread -- than is the ability to teach.
- Margaret Meade
I hope to live to see the day when public education becomes as accountable to parents as private education, and the day when students who want to learn can be matched with teachers who want to teach without parents paying directly out of their pockets. Until then, I will continue to teach public school while entrusting my children's education to a private one. And heaven help America's children if all of us cynical teachers abandon the public schools, leaving public education in the hands of those who believe it is working well.
- Jerry Jesness, Texas special education teeacher, in the April 6 issue of Intellectual Capital.
The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The above quotes began as a list gifted to me by someone who gave me permission to publish it. The below quotes were added later, some from signature blocks on e-mail lists or public forums.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
--Robert Frost
No bird soars too high when he soars with his own wings.
-William Blake
"The beaten path is the safest, but the traffic's terrible."
-Jeff Taylor
"Love truth, but pardon error"
- Voltaire (French philosopher and writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
- Bertrand Russell
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-Helen Keller
To educate a child perfectly requires profounder thought, greater wisdom, than to govern a state.
-- W.E. Channing