Education and Knowledge

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.

'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.' J. R. R.

The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth . . .

To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

The historian must have some conceptions of how men who are not historians behave.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves. E. M.

 

Of all the unbearable nuisances, the ignoramus that has travelled is the worst.

“Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.

It is easy enough to hold an opinion, but hard work to actually know what one is talking about.

 

A modest garden . . . contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.

Remember, we learn nothing by speaking.

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

 

With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

 

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

 

It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

 

An illiterate king is a crowned ass.

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before.