Education and Knowledge

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

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

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

It is good to rub and polish our brains against that of others.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

The book is the most efficient technological instrument for learning that has ever been devised by the human mind.

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.

My own education operated by a succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

I don’t think we should read for instruction but to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.

To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.

In educating the young we use pleasure and pain as rudders to steer their course.

How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life by some dazzling aphorism.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man’s mind.