I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Intelligent people should learn from their experiences. With people on the street, the bad experience has beaten them.

A BMW can’t take you as far as a diploma.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

I believe that in the pursuit of education, individual desire is more influential than institution, and personal faith more forceful than faculty.

I think I’ve got wiser.

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

I came to America to teach my method – not to enter a research experiment.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

You learn a lot from traveling around.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

I’ve learned never to say never.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

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.

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

The future will be better tomorrow.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

For me, education was power.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

You’re always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

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

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

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

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don’t go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

The highest grade I’ve taught is the 11th grade, and the youngest I’ve taught is the 4th grade.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap – let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

Nothing recedes like progress.

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it’s not religion, but you can train through education.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

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