There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

In terms of my involvement in ‚don’t ask, don’t tell‘ and marriage equality and anti-bullying and social emotional learning in schools – these are all things that arise out of my relationship with the world and with my fans.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.

No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I like school and I like learning.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

I don’t measure my success anymore by the Grammys. I can’t because I’ll just end up crushed.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.

The method of instruction in Scouting is that of creating in the boy the desire to learn for himself.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

As soon as I accomplish one goal, I replace it with another one. I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I just say to myself, ‚All right, well, I’d like to headline a tour,‘ and then when I get there, we’ll see what my next goal is.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

That is my wish, hope, instruction for all of you: Take your education seriously, okay? Always do that. Because I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my education.

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

The purpose of education is to make good human beings with skill and expertise… Enlightened human beings can be created by teachers.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

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

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

What I call my ‚self‘ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I always make my dreams into goals.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.