learning quotes from influential philosophers, authors and people
"Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own."
86
"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."
96
"As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself."
98
"Great minds go on asking confounding questions with the same intensity throughout their lives."
116
"..it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multi-task will be the death of the process."
136
"..the initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise."
137
"..you must meet any boredom head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout your life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline."
139
"Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don't learn to control it, it'll destroy you and everything around you."
143
"Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that does not merely 'conserve'--as the physiologist knows. But at the bottom of our souls, quite 'down below,' there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions."
151
"The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways."
153
"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn."
188
"Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right."
203
"If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind."
204
"There's not a single subject you can't understand with perseverance and the occasional stretch of hard work. Resolve yourself to not giving up. Make plans for how you will learn. Be forgiving of yourself if you need to take a lot of time and mark your progress as you go along."
225
"Talent praise only reinforces the notion that success or failure rests on an inborn, unchangeable, static, and stagnant trait. Process praise applauds the effort and work - the action that's taken to get to the next step. You want to reinforce the idea that talent is unimportant, whereas effort is everything."
227
"Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know."
229
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
515
"Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain."
593
"Education is not the learning of facts, it’s rather the training of the mind to think."
605
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
610
"Don’t listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions."
616
"The right question is usually more important than the right answer."
621
"The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants."
622
"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life."
632
"If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life."
634
"Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world."
699
"I grow wiser with every scar."
793
"In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate."
923
"So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there."
935
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
1176
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
1177
"Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on."
1183
"I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."
1184
"We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
1185
"I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"
1186
"Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors."
84
"Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents- will you lean how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?"
138
"Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make."
298
"In the long term, artificial intelligence and automation are going to be taking over so much of what gives humans a feeling of purpose."
299
"We are entering a new world. The technologies of machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding are reaching a nexus of capability. The end result is that we’ll soon have artificially intelligent assistants to help us in every aspect of our lives."
300
"Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence—in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement – wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league."
301