Some of my Favorite Quotes on Learning

Quotes On Learning

What's your favorite quote?   In today's sound-bite world, there is power in a well turned phrase, glory in a succinct, memorable statement. Since learning is one of my greatest passions, I'm fascinated by articulate quotes on learning, training, education, and development. Here are some of my favorites, listed aphabetically by source:
 

"They know enough who know how to learn."
-- Henry Adams
 

"There is no time of life past learning something."
-- Saint Ambrose
 

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
-- Aristotle
 

"Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion. "
-- Allan Bloom

"It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them."
-- Leo Buscaglia

"Only those who have learned a lot are in a position to admit how little they know."
-- L. Carte

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

"Placing the learners in small groups allows them to not only receive and express linguistic information, but to also manipulate it in various forms to gain a full understanding of it."
-- Don Clark
 

"It seems that we learn lessons when we least expect them but always when we need them the most, and, the true 'gift' in these lessons always lies in the learning process itself."
-- Cathy Lee Crosby
 

"Learning is not so much an additive process, with new learning simply piling up on top of existing knowledge, as it is an active, dynamic process in which the connections are constantly changing and the structure reformatted."
-- K. Patricia Cross
 

"Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow."
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo

 

"Learning is not compulsory but neither is survival."
-- W. Edwards Deming
 

"We don't learn from experience.
We learn from reflecting on experience."
-- John Dewey


"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
 

"Every person in this life has something to teach me - and as soon as I accept that, I open myself to truly listening."
-- Catherine Doucette
 

"Just as I have always said that I learned more in university pubs and clubs than I every did in a university classroom, so also I say now that I learn more through online discussions and simulations than I ever did from an online course."
-- Stephen Downes
 
 

"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."
-- Umberto Eco
 

"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."
-- Albert Einstein
 

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Nine tenths of education is encouragement."
-- Anatole France


"Learning is easier than doing and don't confuse the two."
-- Robert Gately
 

"Research shows that you begin learning in the womb and go right on learning until the moment you pass on. Your brain has a capacity for learning that is virtually limitless, which makes every human a potential genius."
-- Michael J. Gelb


"Change is only another word for learning, therefore, the theories of learning will also be the theories of changing. If you want to change, try learning, one might say, or more precisely, if you want to be more in control of your change, take learning more seriously."
-- Charles Handy  (quoted at the introdduction to The Dialogue of Learning and Change)
 

"Read books, listen to tapes, attend seminars - they are decades of wisdom reduced to invaluable hours."
 -- Mark Victor Hansen
 

"If you're not learning while you're earning, you're cheating yourself of the better portion of your just compensation."
-- Napoleon Hill
 

"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
-- Eric Hoffer

"There is no difference between living and learning . . . it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being separate. Teaching is human communication and like all communication, elusive and difficult...we must be wary of the feeling that we know what we are doing in class. When we are most sure of what we are doing, we may be closest to being a bore."
-- John Holt, What Do I Do On Monday?
 

"No one limits your growth but you. If you want to earn more, learn more."
--Tom Hopkins
 

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."
--Thomas H. Huxley
 

"Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen."
-- Ivan Illich
 

"The brain develops better in concert with others…"
-- Eric Jensen
 
 

"Meaning is more important to the brain than information"
-- Eric Jensen
 

"Everyone and everything around you is your teacher."
-- Ken Keyes Jr
 

"Nothing can be effectively controlled, in the long run, from the top of a hierarchy-- or from any one perspective.  People are basically trustworthy. Only workplaces that give their members the chance to learn and add value through their work will succeed in the long run."
-- Art Kleiner
 

"When you want to win a game, you have to teach. When you lose a game, you have to learn."
--Tom Landry
 

"The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate."
-- Doug Larson
 

"All of life is learning; therefore education can never end."
-- Eduard Lindemann


"The best of all things is to learn.  Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever."
-- Louis L'Amour

 
 

"If telling were the same as training, we'd all be so smart we could hardly stand ourselves."
-- Robert Mager


"Take the attitude of a student. Never be too big to ask questions. Never know too much to learn something new."
-- Og Mandino
 

"Education is not something which the teacher does... it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being."
-- Maria Montessori
 

"When I learn something new-and it happens every day-I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest."
-- Bill Moyers

"Learning is the best of all wealth;
it is easy to carry,
thieves cannot steal it,
the tyrants cannot seize it;
neither water nor fire can destroy it;
and far from decreasing, it increases by giving."
-- Naladiyar (c.5th-6th century), Tamil ethical literature
 

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
-- Pablo Picasso

"It is best to learn as we go, not go as we have learned."
-- Leslie Jeanne Sahler
 

"You can learn new things at any time in your life if you're willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you."
-- Barbara Sher


"What have you learned today? Asking -- and answering that question every day is a launch pad to success."
-- Doug Smith


"Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life."
-- B.F. Skinner  

 

"To learn anything fast and effectively, you have to see it, hear it, and feel it."
-- Tony Stockwell
 

"When an automobile maker is designing a new model, he does not ask the people in charge of wheels and tires to do an ROI study to justify having wheels and tires on the new model. It is accepted that the new model will not be complete, will not work, without wheels and tires. Learning should be viewed as the wheels and tires of any organizational change effort - no change effort can be successful without learning."
-- Daniel R. Tobin
 
 

"Knowledge itself, therefore, turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put differently, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier."
-- Alvin Toffler
 

"Ignorance breeds fear; the more you learn about your subject, the less fear it holds for you."
-- Brian Tracy
 

 "Growth is the only evidence of life."
-- Herb True
 

"Our best chance for happiness is education."
-- Mark VanDorn
 

"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."
-- John Wooden
 

"It's not whether we have learned from history--we have--but our awareness of what we have learned."
-- John Woods



--
Kimball Findlay Ed.S.
kc4rzw@gmail.com