The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

I fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

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

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Respect the burden.

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

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.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

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.

There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, ‚I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.‘

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

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?

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.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Start with God – the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

When schools flourish, all flourishes.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.