This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes." - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"The Army’s After Action Review (AAR) is arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised. " - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. " - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it... This then, is the basic meaning of a learning organization -an organization that is continuously expanding its capacity to create its future. Survival learning or what is more often called adaptive learning is important - indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, adaptive learning must be joined by generative learning, learning that enhances our capacity to create." - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"Educators can no longer assume that somebody else will do the educational job for them. With everybody else going to school till adulthood, school has become the place for learning whatever one needs in order to be both human and effective." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them." - Peter R. Breggin
"Books have led some to learning and others to madness, when they swallow more than they can digest." - Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL
"Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked. " - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words." - Pierre Abelard, aka Abailard or Abaelard or Habalaarz
"As a child learning to walk falls a thousand times before he can stand, and after that falls again and again until at last he can walk, so are we as little children before God." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
"Avtalion said: “Sages, be careful with your words lest you incur the penalty of exile and are called to a place where the waters of learning are impure and the disciples that come after you drink of them and die; and the Heavenly Name is consequently profaned.”" - Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
"All learning has an emotional base. " - Plato NULL
"Because a free man ought not to learn anything under duress. Compulsory physical exercise does no harm to the body, but compulsory learning never sticks to the mind. Then don't use compulsion… but let your children's lessons take the form of play. You will learn more about their natural abilities that way. " - Plato NULL
"We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection." - Plato NULL
"Know what you are talking about... Learning to think rigorously, so as to act rightly and to serve humanity better. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
"In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. There are some authors of so-called objective, scientific publications in the field of psychology who remind me of the officer in Kafka's Penal Colony in their zeal and their consistent self-destructiveness. In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka's convicted prisoner, on the other hand, we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"There is first the problem of acquiring content, which is learning. There is another problem of acquiring learning skills, which is not merely learning, but learning to learn, not velocity, but acceleration. Learning to learn is one of the great inventions of living things. It is tremendously important. It makes evolution, biological as well as social, go faster. And it involves the development of the individual." - Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
"THE lessons of fear which the child receives from its parents are intensified by the methods employed at the school in which he receives his education and life-training. We glory in the fact that we have made great strides in the science of education, that we are more practical in the choice of subjects for study, that we have a deeper insight into the soul of the child. And yet, in our method of imparting knowledge and in the relations between teacher and pupil, we can boast of but little progress. We still look upon the child as a more or less unwilling receptacle that must be stuffed with learning. The teacher is still a being to be feared, the school room still a prison house, and learning a punishment. Our system of education is still based on reward and punishment. A high mark is still the encouragement for zeal in study, while the backward student is haunted by the prospect of a low grade. The child, under present methods, prepares his lessons either in order to gain the reward of a high mark, or for fear of the contempt and humiliation that accompanies a low grade. In other words, he works not because of the intrinsic interest of his work but in the hope of reward or in the fear of punishment. The first motive breeds the harmful spirit of competition in the young mind. " - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein
"I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
"The only thing that gets in the way of my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein
"He who has more learning than good deeds is like a tree with many branches but weak roots; the first great storm will throw it to the ground. He whose good works are greater than his knowledge is like a tree with fewer branches but with strong and spreading roots, a tree which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot." - Rabbinical Proverbs
"Toastmasters is learning through doing and improving through criticism." - Ralph C. Smedley
"Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants." - Rachel Naomi Remen
"Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with..." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated." - Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
"We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding... We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise." - Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
"Having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias — they let me in." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You" - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
"It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
"As long as you live, keep learning how to live." - Red Jacket, aka Sagoyewatha NULL
"An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime ...walk your own path, as you please." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Jonathan Livingston Seagull is speaking to his young fledgling son who is learning to fly: You will begin to touch heaven . . . in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there. . . . To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. . . . The trick is to stop seeing yourself as trapped inside a limited body that has a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick is to know that your true nature lives, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Mistakes - call them unexpected learning experiences." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn't make sense right away." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!" - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"But it's never too late, or too early, to be happy -- a message Carlson wants everybody to listen to. There is a big payoff to learning to be happier... You handle your parents better, you handle your peer pressure, you handle life in general with a lot more equanimity, and it just gets to be a lot more fun." - Richard Carlson
"There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified" - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
"Let anyone who possesses a vivid imagination and a highly-wrought nervous system, even now, in this century, with all the advantages of learning and science, go and sit among the rocks, or in the depths of the wood, and think of immortality, and all that that word really means, and by-and-by a mysterious awe will creep into the mind, and it will half believe in the possibility of seeing or meeting something -- something -- it knows not exactly what." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies