Topics / learning

Quotes about learning

Study, teaching and education.

7 quotes with a known source.

If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Source: Enchiridion 13

Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Source: Analects 2.15, tr. James Legge

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Source: Essays, "Of Studies" (1625)

A little learning is a dang'rous thing.

Source: An Essay on Criticism (1711)

Whoever does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Source: Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Source: Reported in interviews; no single original source

Let all things flow freely, without violence.

Source: His motto ("Omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus")

Quotes about learning that are usually credited to the wrong person.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Actually: No evidence Einstein said or wrote it; versions of the fish-and-tree fable circulated without his name long before.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Actually: An old proverb, attributed to medieval writers and printed in English in 1867 — two years before Gandhi was born.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The real words: Not in Aristotle. His real line (Nicomachean Ethics I.3) is about expecting only as much precision as a subject allows.

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.

Actually: A loose modern rendering of an idea from the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (3rd century BC). Not in Franklin.