Education and Knowledge

An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

A family library is a breeding-place for character.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

and observe for himself, and who has hunger for it.

Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge— is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.

Knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.

If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.

He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.