We’ve got to dumb America up again.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Mastery, I learned, was not something genetic, or for a lucky few. It is something we can all attain if get rid of some misconceptions and gain clarity as to the required path.

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.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

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.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

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

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.

I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it’s government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

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.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Learn to think continentally.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

I’m not really book-smart.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

Technology is huge; I wanted to learn about it. People might say that’s odd, but I think it’s odd if artists aren’t interested in the world around them. I’m always chasing that.

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

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

Me not finishing school – in my head, I still have this insecurity when I’m talking to someone educated.

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

See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They’re taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.

So we know that it’s not enough for us to simply encourage more people to study abroad. We also need to make sure that they can actually afford it.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

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

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.