Top 100 Learning Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best learning quotes ever written, picked out of the full learning archive on QuoteForever. You will find Andy Hargreaves, Henry David Thoreau, Edsger Dijkstra and Confucius among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

2

The most important knowledge teachers need to do good work is a knowledge of how students are experiencing learning and perceiving their teacher's actions.

3

The most important lesson I've learned from sports is how to be not only a gracious winner, but a good loser as well. Not everyone wins all the time, as a matter of fact, no one wins all the time. Winning is the easy part, losing is really tough. But, you learn more from one loss than you do from a million wins. You learn a lot about sportsmanship.

4

The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.

5

The teacher can always tell when you did your homework on the bus.

6

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

7

Skills are never taught, they are acquired. I can give you a camera, but can't feed your vision.

8

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

9

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

10

Dive into the sea of thought, and find there pearls beyond price.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No ... - Ralph Waldo Emerson 11

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

12

Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.

13

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

14

Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.

15

It is true that the mental aspect of kung-fu is the desired end; however, to achieve this end, technical skill must come first.

16

Not everyone has equal abilities, but everyone should have equal opportunity for education.

17

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

18

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

19

Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

20

You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.

21

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

22

As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.

23

The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame; But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stain'd his name!

24

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments.

25

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

26

Drawing general conclusions about your main weaknesses can provide a great stimulus to further growth.

27

Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skillful hands; in unskillful, the most mischievous.

28

When the words are fuzzy, the programmers reflexively retreat to the most precise method of articulation available: source code. Although there is nothing more precise than code, there is also nothing more permanent or resistant to change. So the situation frequently crops up where nomenclature confusion drives programmers to begin coding prematurely, and that code becomes the de facto design, regardless of its appropriateness or correctness.

29

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

30

On school culture: It's hard to eat something you've had a relationship with.

31

High performance leaders capitalize on crises to galvanize the motivation and actions of people in the organization.

32

We will not achieve high performance in education if we replace teachers with machines or turn teachers into machines.

33

Improvement is about doing something better; innovation is about doing something new.

34

Every solution has a problem.

35

Leadership is often the afterthought of educational change.

36

Students are often the last to know about change that is occurring in their own school system.

37

We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative. Sherlock Holmes speaking with Dr. Watson.

38

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

39

There is no better way to learn than to teach.

40

One of the unfortunate things about our education system is that we do not teach students how to avail themselves of their subconscious capabilities.

41

You've got to win in sports - that's talent - but you've also got to learn how to remind everybody how you did win, and how often. That comes with experience.

42

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

43

we learn the process of emptying out, cleaning house, both within and without.

44

When failure is not an option, we can forget about creativity, learning, and innovation.

45

none of what I know is out of books. ... I prefer tactual learning. Touching, on the quick of the sore nail, of present, mobile life. To toy, to gnaw, to tear: at the living element of pain. Like at a living drumstick.

46

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

47

We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.

48

There is a theology to gardening that few of us consider, but to understand this theology means relinquishing much control - our arsenal of books, techniques, tools, chemicals, fertilizers, fancy hybrids, and expectations. Yet, that is exactly what we must do if we are to fully embrace a more spiritual form of gardening. As a part of Nature we must learn to enter our garden as if it were truly sacred, we must learn to enter with humility.

49

What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning.

50

Love of goodness without love of learning degenerates into simple-mindedness. Love of knowledge without love of learning degenerates into utter lack of principle. Love of faithfulness without love of learning degenerates into injurious disregard of consequences. Love of uprightness without love of learning degenerates into harshness. Love of courage without love of learning degenerates into insubordination. Love of strong character without love of learning degenerates into mere recklessness.

51

Things have their roots and branches. Affairs have their beginnings and their ends. To know what is first and what is last will lead one near the Way.

52

Get growing. Back yourself and make mistakes. It's your mistakes and observations that are your greatest tutors.

53

Motive is also important in our quest for knowledge and in the questioning that accompanies it. In commenting on our duty to educate for eternity, Eugene England writes: Teaching or learning - with the Spirit of God simply means (though it is not simple) that we are doing so with an eye single to eternal, not worldly, values, with an eye single to lasting development of the mind and spirit and to useful service to others, especially to aid in their lasting development of mind and spirit.

54

Don't worry about your rating, work on your playing strength and your rating will follow.

55

Having to know the answers puts in terrible positions from which to learn.

56

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, “how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?

57

Today, cultural and legal changes mean that individuals expect and demand a voice in decisions that affect their lives and often they have the power to undermine those decisions if they aren't allow their voice.

58

I take great solace that Einstein failed math. I failed math. I also failed English and home economics. Einstein was an underachiever.

59

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

60

Well, until this very day, I'm still learning.

61

'No Child Left Behind' requires states and school districts to ensure that all students are learning and are reaching their highest potential. Special education students should not be left out of these accountability mechanisms.

62

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

63

I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's where the fun is.

64

Nobody comes out of their mother's womb doing cucarachas.

65

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret; The code of night tapped on my tongue; What had been one was many sounding minded.

66

The key to ultimate succcess is the determination to progress day by day.

67

Playing without a concurrent critical review of one's skills will simply get you nowhere.

68

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

69

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

70

You never stop learning. If you have a teacher, you never stop being a student.

71

Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.

72

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.

73

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

74

I was always my own teacher.

75

We may differ widely in environments, education, learning, knowledge, or lack of it, and in our personalities, our likes and dislikes. But if we set ourselves the task, we'll find a meeting place somehow and somewhere.

76

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

77

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

78

St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. "I would finish hoeing my garden," he replied.

79

The wind which snuffs the candle fans the fire.

80

More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity.

81

The first indication of a young person's growing smarter is that he no longer understands the things which he used to consider quite intelligible and self-evident.

82

He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

83

Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint.

84

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

85

The test of good education is seeing how it behaves in a fight.

86

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

87

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

88

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

89

I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything.

90

Our system of education is locked in a time capsule. You want to say to the people in charge, 'You're not using today's tools! Wake up!'

91

Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.

92

He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence.

93

Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.

94

If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks.

95

Science has taught us to lengthen life. Now we must learn to make a longer life worth living. Older people deserve choices that let us live out our days as we wish. We've seen people making such choices all over America, and we realize what we might have known from the start: For most of us, there really is no place like home.

96

I learned that it is possible for us to create light, sound and order within us no matter what calamity befall us in the outer world.

97

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

98

No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

99

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

100

The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

More Learning quotes

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