Education and Knowledge

Knowledge dwells

A man who reviews the old so as to find out the new is qualified to teach others.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

That lyf so short,

The true University of these days is a collection of books.

Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.

I and the public know

on expanding universities

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

The fool does not ask; he who asks is no fool.

If you know [something], to recognize that you know it; and if you don’t know [something], to realize that you don’t know it—that is [true] knowledge.

Learning has no boundaries.