Quotations about Training & Learning
They know enough who know how to learn.
~Henry Adams
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
~Henry Adams
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
~Mortimer Adler
Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.
~Josef Albers
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influences...
~Amos Alcott
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
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
~Antisthenes
Education is the best viaticum of old age.
~Aristotle
What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
~Aristotle
If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't you're right.
~Mary Kay Ash
Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.
~Francis Bacon
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.
~Francis Bacon
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man.
~Francis Bacon
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
~Francis Bacon
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
~Bernard m. Baruch
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
The major challenge for leaders in the twenty-first century will be how to release the brain power of their organisations.
~Warren Bennis
You can observe a lot by just looking around.
~Yogi Berra
Knowledge increases in proportion to its use - that is, the more we teach the more we learn.
~H. P. Blavatsky
Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.
~Niels Bohr
You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
~Neils Bohr
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverance to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
~Jacob Bronowski
A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.
~Buddha
When the student is ready, the master appears.
~Buddhist Proverb
We think too much about effective methods of teaching and not enough about effective methods of learning.
~John Carolus S.J.
No matter how good teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his own education.
~John Carolus S.J.
The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.
~Joseph Campbell
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
~Albert Camus
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
~Chinese Proverb
I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.
~Chinese Proverb
By viewing the old we learn the new
~Chinese Proverb
Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.
~Chinese Proverb
Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
~Chinese Proverb
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
~Chinese Proverb
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
~Winston Churchill
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
~Winston Churchill
What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth.
~Marcus T. Cicero
I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
~Marcus T. Cicero
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
~Marcus T. Cicero
Learning without thought is labor lost.
~Confucius
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 important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
~Pierre de Coubertin
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
~Leonardo da Vinci
To think is to differ.
~Clarence Darrow
'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change'
~Charles Darwin
'The analysis of data will not by itself produce new ideas'
~Edward de Bono
When a low probability line of thought leads to an effective idea, there is a 'Eureka' moment and at once the low-probability approach acquires the highest probability.
~Edward De Bono
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
~Rene Descartes
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.
~John Dewey
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
~John Dewey
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
~Abbé Dimnet
Nurture your mind with great thoughts.
~Benjamin Disraeli
The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated in quotations.
~Benjamin Disraeli
There is no education like adversity.
~Benjamin Disraeli
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
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depricate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground.
~Frederick Douglass
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simplier.
~Albert Einstein
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
~Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
~Albert Einstein
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
~Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
~Albert Einstein
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
~Albert Einstein
Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
~Albert Einstein
In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.
~Paul Eldridge
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest.
~T.S. Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
~T.S. Eliot
Reinventing the wheel is a process.
~Rashid Elisha
To arrive at the simple is difficult.
~Rashid Elisha
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
~George Eliot
Every artist was at first an amateur.
~Ralph W. Emerson
It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
~Epictetus
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future.
~Euripides
All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.
~Martin H. Fischer
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
It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.
~Martin H. Fischer
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
Creative Thinking may mean simply the relisation that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
~Rudolph Flesch
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
~Henry Ford
Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
~Anatole France
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
~Sigmund Freud
I have an infamously low capacity for visualizing relationships, which made the study of geometry and all subjects derived from it impossible for me.
~Sigmund Freud
When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.
~Sigmund Freud
The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up and does not stop until you get to the office.
~Robert Frost
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
~Galielo Galilei
Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
~Mahatma Gandhi
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~Mohandes Gandhi
Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end.
~Kahlil Gibran
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.
~Nikki Giovanni
A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.
~Johann W. Goethe
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
~Goethe
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
~John W. Gardner
The basis of creativity has always been a new connection. To make connections would take hours using words. Your subconscious has to use pictures.
~William JJ Gordon
The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.
~Henry S. Haskins
A wonderful harmony arises from joining together the seemingly unconnected.
~Heraclitus
If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult.
~Heraclitus
People learn more quickly by doing something or seeing something done.
~Gilbert Highet
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
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
~Hoffa
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.
~Robert M. Hutchins
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
Sometimes one man with courage is a majority.
~Andrew Jackson
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
~William James
These then are my last words to you: be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
~William James
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
~Henry James Jr.
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
~George Jessel
Education is man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.
~Kenneth G. Johnson
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its values only to its scarcity.
~Samuel Johnson
Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities.
~Terry Josephson
To teach is to learn twice.
~Joseph Joubert
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
~Thomas A. Kempis
Creative activity is not a superimposed, extraneous task against which the body, or brain protests, but an orchestration of ... joyful doing.
~Gyorgy Kepes
Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.
~Charles F. Kettering
Questions are the creative acts of intelligence.
~Frank Kingdom
I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.
~Eartha Kitt
Every creative act involves...a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.
~Arthur Koestler
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
~Alfred Korzybski
When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, "Not to unlearn what you have learned!"
~Diogenes Laertius
You learn something every day if you pay attention.
~Ray LeBlond
Learning is never done without errors and defeat.
~Vladimir Lenin
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
~Vladimir Lenin
I have been maturing as a teacher. New experiences bring new sensitivities and flexibility.
~Howard Lester
To do just the opposite is a form of imitation.
~Georg Lichtenberg
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
~Abraham Lincoln
I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
~Abraham Lincoln
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.
~Abraham Lincoln
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
~Ann Morrow Lindberg
Certain subjects yield a general power that may be applied in any direction and should be studied by all.
~John Locke
Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
~Vince Lombardi
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
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
~John Lubbock
One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
~Robert Lynd
The only dumb question is a question you don't ask.
~Paul MacCready
To define is to destroy, to suggest is to create.
~Stephane Mallarme
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
~Dudley Field Malone
Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.
~Horace Mann
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it inn terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
~Thomas Mann
The young don't know what age is, and the old forget what youth was.
~Seumas MacManus
The idea is there locked inside. All you have to do is remove the excess stone.
~Michelangelo
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
~Michelangelo
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
~Marvin Minsky
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
~Mohammed
Let the potential artist in our children come to life that they may surmount industrial monotonies and pressures.
~Barbara Morgan
Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating.
~C.B. Neblette
The critical factor is not class size but rather the nature of the teaching as it affects learning.
~C.B. Neblette
How many writers are there... who, breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety about the parts.
~Cardinal Newman
On being asked how he had "discovered" the law of gravitation, Newton replied 'by thinking on it continually.
~Isaac Newton
Knowledge rests on knowledge; what is new is meaningful because it departs slightly from what was known before.
~Robert Oppenheimer
Only the mind cannot be sent into exile.
~Ovid
I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything.
~George Herbert Palmer
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
In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.
~Louis Pasteur
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
~Pablo Picasso
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
~Plato
An object in possession seldom contains the same charm that it had in pursuit.
~Pliny the Younger
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.
~Plutarch
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
~Alexander Pope
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. ~Alexander Pope
The basic idea behind teaching is to teach people what they need to know.
~Carl Rogers
Education...is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,... by praise, but above all -- by example.
~John Ruskin
Men learn while they teach.
~Lucius A. Seneca
The great pilot can sail even when his canvass is rent.
~Lucius A. Seneca
Wonder is the desire for knowledge.
~St. Thomas Aquinas
It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning.
~St. Augustine
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
~Bernard Keble Sandwell
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
~George Santayana
Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
~Arthur Schopenhauer
Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.
~Dana Stewart Scott
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.
~George Bernard Shaw
The mind is like a clock that is constantly running down and must be wound up daily with good thoughts.
~Fulton J Sheen
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
~Socrates
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
~Socrates
One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty, until you try.
~Sophocles
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~Sir Richard Steele
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
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
~Henry David Thoreau
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
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.
~Harry S. Truman
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
~Mark Twain
It is easy to spot an informed man -- his opinions are just like your own.
~Miguel de Unamuno
You can't direct the wind but you can adjust the sails.
~author unknown
Even the clearest water appears opaque at great depth.
~author unknown
We think of the effective teachers we have had over the years with a sense of recognition, but those who have touched our humanity we remember with a deep sense of gratitude.
~author unknown
The best way to know life is to love many things.
~Vincent Van Gogh
People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.
~Bill Vaughan
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
~William Arthur Ward
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
~H.G. Wells
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
~H.G. Wells
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
~Orson Welles
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
~Alfred North Whitehead
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
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
~Woodrow Wilson
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
~Ludwig Wittgenstein
I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.
~Thomas Wolfe
Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
~William Wordsworth