Back to School: Book Quotes About Education and Learning

The new collection of book quotes in the Quotebook this time is devoted to the themes of education, learning, teaching, schools, and students. Let’s enjoy a pinch of wisdom from great authors and thinkers of different times.

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

(Mahatma Gandhi)

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Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.

(Confucius)

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You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

(Oscar Wilde)

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Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

(Nelson Mandela)

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Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

(Walter Cronkite)

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Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

(Robert Frost)

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“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn”.

(T.H. White)

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Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

(Margaret Mead)

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Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

(Aristotle)

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Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.

(Martin Luther King Jr.)

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Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

(Plato)

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The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

(Plutarch)

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The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

(C.S. Lewis)

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A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.

(Nelson Mandela)

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Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

(C.S. Lewis)

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Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

(Henry Ford)

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In learning, you will teach, and in teaching, you will learn.

(Phil Collins)

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Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

(Jim Rohn)

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The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

(Baruch Spinoza)

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Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life.

(Brigham Young)

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The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.

(Michel Legrand)

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True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
own.

(Nikos Kazantzakis)

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Education is no substitute for intelligence.

(Frank Herbert)

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If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

(Robert Orben)

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If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.

(Romain Rolland)

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Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

(Richard Shaull)

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Ignorance is the parent of fear.

(Herman Melville)

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A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.

(James Allen)

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Play is the highest form of research.

(Albert Einstein)

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What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

(Thomas Carlyle)

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The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

(Jean Piaget)

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I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

(Isaac Asimov)

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Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.

(Confucius)

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An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

(Tara Westover)

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A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.

(Moliere)

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Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.

(Aristotle)

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Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.

(Frank Herbert)

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Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.

(Frantz Fanon)

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Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.

(Friedrich von Schiller)

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Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as hard duty. Never regard study as duty but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

(Albert Einstein)

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Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

(Iris Murdoch)

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The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.

(Joseph Campbell)

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The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

(Paulo Freire)

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When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

(Greg Mortenson)

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….a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable – books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

(Mortimer J. Adler)

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The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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