Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

In ‚Gran Torino,‘ I play a guy who’s racially offensive. But he learned. It shows that you’re never too old to learn and embrace people that you don’t understand to begin with. It seems like nobody else got that message, I guess.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

I learned a long time ago how to be coachable.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

History, a distillation of rumour.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

I don’t read books much.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

Without tact you can learn nothing.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

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

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‚How to Build a Boat.‘

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.