Great Throughts Treasury

"That one is learned who has reduced his learning to practice." - Hitopadesha NULL

"Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not ill your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone will you be on the right road to the Gate." - Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

"Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. " - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov

"It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds." - Ivan Illich

"Real learning comes when the competitive spirit has ceased. " - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"For the total development of the human being, solitude as a means of cultivating sensitivity becomes a necessity. One has to know what it means to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learnt. One can indicate, but learning by what is indicated is not the experiencing of solitude or meditation. To experience what is solitude and what is meditation, one must be in in a state of inquiry; only a mind that is in a state of inquiry is capable of learning. But when inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learnt without experiencing it." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Education is the cultivation of the mind so that action is not self-centred; it is learning throughout life to break down the walls which the mind builds in order to be secure, and from which arises fear with all its complexities. To be rightly educated, you have to study hard and not be lazy. Be good at games, not to beat another, but to amuse yourself. Eat the right food, and keep physically fit. Let the mind be alert and capable of dealing with the problems of life, not as a Hindu, a Communist, or a Christian, but as a human being. To be rightly educated, you have to understand yourself; you have to keep on learning about yourself. When you stop learning, life becomes ugly and sorrowful. Without goodness and love, you are not rightly educated." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage." - Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.

"An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy. A head has one use: For loving a true love. Feet: To chase after. Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind, for learning what men have done and tried to do. Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why. A lover is always accused of something. But when he finds his love, whatever was lost in the looking comes back completely changed. " - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL

"To be proud of learning is the greatest ignorance. " - Jeremy Taylor

"For a choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message." - Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner

"Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account" - John Dewey

"A possibility of continuing progress is opened up by the fact that in learning one act, methods are developed good for use in other situations. Still more important is the fact that the human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn." - John Dewey

"There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience." - John Dewey

"There is no treasure but Truth, there is no Truth but Wisdom. There is no Wisdom, but from Learning, and Learning is won by the devotion of hours, years, days and nights to the works of Nature and the Treasures of Truth that others have gathered." - John Dickinson, pen name Fabius

"The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt

"In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn. " - John Naisbitt

"If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who was content to do things his own way. A player should be interested in learning why things are done a certain way. The reasons behind the teaching often go a long way to helping develop the skill." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden

"Teams make you better than you are, multiply your value, enable you to do what you do best, allow you to help others do their best, give you more time, provide you with companionship, help you fulfill the desires of your heart and compound your vision and effort. Transmit your vision emotionally by gaining credibility, demonstrating passion, establishing relationships and communicating a felt need. Transmit it logically by confronting reality, formulating strategy, accepting responsibility, celebrating victory and learning from defeat. Values hold the team together, provide stability for the team to grow upon, measure the team's performance, give direction and guidance and attract like-minded people." - John C. Maxwell

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. " - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"25 Lessons: Lead More, Manage Less 1. Lead. 2. Manage less. 3. Articulate your vision. 4. Simplify. 5. Get less formal. 6. Energize others. 7. Face reality. 8. See change as an opportunity. 9. Get good ideas from everywhere. 10. Follow up. Build a Winning Organization. 11. Get rid of bureaucracy. 12. Eliminate boundaries. 13. Put values first. 14. Cultivate leaders. 15. Create learning culture. Harness Your People 16. Involve everyone. 17. Make everybody a team player. 18. Stretch. 19. Instill confidence. 20. Make business fun. Build the Market-Leading Company 21. Be number 1 or number 2 22. Live quality. 23. Constantly focus on innovation. 24. Live speed. 25. Behave like a small company." - Jack Welch, fully John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr.

"The true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a university is not learning or aquirement, but rather is thought or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be called philosophy." - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman

"Education is not just learning to read but learning what to think about what you read and how to choose worthwhile reading material. It's about learning to discern truth and falsehood in what you read." - John Taylor Gatto

"Education is not just learning the facts of science but learning why they matter and how to apply them ethically." - John Taylor Gatto

"Education is not just learning dates and events from history but learning to apply the lessons of lives well lived and lives poorly lived -- and how to tell the difference." - John Taylor Gatto

"We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure all your life." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner

"There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion; it is this, indeed, which gives a value to all the rest, which sets them at work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person who is possessed of them. Without it, learning is pedantry, and wit impertinence ; virtue itself looks like weakness; the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice." - Joseph Addison

"There is no easy method of learning difficult things. The method is to close the door, give out that you are not at home, and work." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre

"I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence." - Julius Erving, fully Julius Winfield Erving II, aka Dr. J

"Clinical experience has indicated that where a child has been exposed early in his live to episodes of physical violence, whether he himself is the victim or ... the witness, he will often later demonstrate similar outbursts of uncontrollable rage and violence of his own. Aggression becomes an easy outlet through which the child's frustrations and tensions flow, not just because of a simple matter of learning that can be just as simply unlearned, not just because he is imitating a bad behavior model and can be taught to imitate something more constructive, but because these traumatic experiences have overwhelmed him. His own emotional development is too immature to withstand the crippling inner effects of outer violence. Something happens to the child's character, to his sense of reality, to the development of his controls against impulses that may not later be changed easily but which may lead to reactions that in turn provoke more reactions - one or more of which may be criminal. Then society reacts against him for what he did, but more for what all of us have done - unpleasantly - to one another. Upon him is laid the iniquity of us all." - Karl Menninger, fully Karl Augustus Menninger

"Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges." - Katherine Fullerton Gerould

"Whether [teaching] contexts come from richness of experience, a restless curiosity, opportunities for leisure and study, or from an education aimed at breadth, they are necessities for affecting the learning of diverse students. " - Kenneth Eble, fully Kenneth Eugene Eble

"It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them." - Leo Busacaglia

"A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love" - Leo Busacaglia

"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

"Children who are struggling present a range of issues from severe breakdowns in learning to the frustrations of those whose efforts in school far exceed their achievements. Some have brains that are wired to handle a lot of information at once. Others can only absorb and process a little information at a time. Still others must look at information many times before grasping it. Some kids' brains can recall information and skills rapidly, while others need more time to process and respond to a stimulus." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine

"Yet these types of responses to children with learning differences are all too common. The fact is that these kids often have good minds with real and obvious intellectual strengths. However, they suffer from what is often subtle dysfunction - patterns of brain wiring that makes certain aspects of learning exceedingly difficult. These children are highly vulnerable - and they're slipping through the cracks." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine

"Success is a vitamin that every kid must take in order to thrive during his or her school years. We, as teachers and parents, must make sure that this critical learning "supplement" is available to all students. All Kinds of Minds believes that embracing the unique set of ideas and practices that follow will increase our odds of succeeding at this essential task." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine

"While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit." - Lewis Carroll, pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

"I always thought it was a question of achieving some permanent state of tranquillity ... but it's not. It's more like learning to surf. The waves keep rolling in, each different from the last, and you have to ride them, instead of getting pounded to bits." - Lisa Alther

"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." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"Human learning has often been an instrument, not a source, of hostility to religion. " - John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton, fully John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship." - Louisa May Alcott

"Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"You aren't learning anything when you're talking. " - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit." - Maria Montessori

"I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this because it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never know until it's too late to do anything about it, how sweet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it for them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given. Every day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself." - Marian Wright Edelman

"The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door." - Martin Luther King, Jr.