When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
—John Steinbeck
They gave him a seashell: "So you'll learn to love the water." They opened a cage and let a bird go free: "So you'll learn to love the air." They gave him a geranium: "So you'll learn to love the earth." And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight. "Don't ever, ever open it. So you'll learn to love mystery.
—Eduardo Galeano
The darkest hour in the history of any young man is when he sits down to study how to get money without honestly earning it.
—Horace Greeley
No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is.
—Isaac Rosenfeld
Every artist was first an amateur.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
—Thomas Carlyle
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
—David Foster Wallace
There are no easy methods of learning difficult things; the method is to close your door, give out that you are not at home, and work.
—Joseph de Maistre
Careful. We don't want to learn from this.
—Bill Watterson
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
—Franklin P. Jones
I have learned that no matter how much I learn about anything, I am always at 'the threshold of ignorance,' a frontier of inner and outer awareness (and lack of it) in which some things have become second nature, some things are new and a little uncomfortable, and some things are a complete mystery.
—Rich Frye
I've learned that it's all about choice. You can choose to turn regrets into lessons that change your future.
—Ali Harris in The First Last Kiss
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
—John Updike
We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?
—Michel de Montaigne
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
—Helen Keller