The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

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

Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

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

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.

Common sense is not so common.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

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

For me, education was power.

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.‘

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

First grade is very cheap. It’s the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don’t do it right.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

The dreams and passions stored within hearts are powerful keys which can unlock a wealth of potential.

There’s room for role models who make mistakes.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Don’t get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that – if you dare. But get older because it’s fun!

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

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.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that’s being pushed in a manner in schools that’s completely reprehensible. It’s not education, in my estimation. It’s a form of indoctrination.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

He who hath many friends hath none.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

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

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

He that sows thorns should never go barefoot.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

I need physics more than friends.

I wanted to race cars. I didn’t like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

I hardly went to school.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

If you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful – that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience – every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.