Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. -- Nietzsche

What is the first business of one who studies philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for any one to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows. -- Epictetus, How to apply general Principles to particular Cases, Chap. xvii.

If a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties. -- Francis Bacon

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. -- H. L. Mencken

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays, 1928

Men are so constituted that every one undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Green Hubbard

To err is human - but it feels divine. -- Mae West

Bershere's Formula for Failure: There are only two kinds of people who fail: those who listen to nobody... and those who listen to everybody.

They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!

We have enough youth, how about a fountain of Smarts?

Old age is too high a price to pay for maturity.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

One is not truly alive if he can find someone from which nothing can be learned. -- Unknown

Intelligence is like a river: the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (?)

Fortune was not so completely unfriendly to him that she did not leave him some brief reminder of the force of his intelligence. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, Art of War, 1516

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James

This is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. -- Doris Lessing

"In times of change, it is the learners that inherit the future" (Stuart Emmett)

"Those who are in love with learning, are in love with life" (Charles Handy)

"Learning is more important than knowledge" (Stuart Emmett)

"All experience is learning" (Peter Vaill)

"When I learn, I have to do something. Therefore I change" (Stuart Emmett)

"Learning is learnable" (Guy Claxton)

"Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival" (W Edwards Deming)

"Having the ability to learn, is also, having the abilities to survive and to succeed" (Stuart Emmett)

"Personally I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught" (Winston Churchill)

"The illiterate of the future, will be the person who does not know how to learn" (Alvin Toffler)

"Learning to learn, is often about making the unconscious, conscious" (Stuart Emmett)

"The capacity to learn is an asset which never becomes obsolete" (The learning declaration group)

"Learning pays" (Christopher Ball)

"You become what you learn, as what you think, is what you are" (Stuart Emmett)

"Learning reinforces the informed/ conscious and discriminating choices that underpin democracy"

"Learning is the only source of sustainable development"

"Learning to learn is the most fundamental learning of all"

"Learning is the key to developing your ability and your potential"

"If I learn something new, then I go to bed happy" (John Cleese)

"If companies were opposed to learning, then new recruits would have to learn nothing as every thing would be like it is, every where else. A Company opposed to learning is logically, therefore, impossible. Unfortunately however, not every company would seem to operate logically" (Stuart Emmett)

“The funny thing about change is that it can never end; but the other funny thing is about management. They keep making the same mistakes; they do not learn, therefore, they cannot change.” (Unknown)

Ethel Barrymore: You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Flannery O'Conner: Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Fritz Redl: Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show. When We Deal With Children

George Bernard Shaw: A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

George Peabody: Education: a debt due from present to future generations.

George Santayana: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Gloria Steinem: The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

Goethe: Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Helen Keller: Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

Henry B. Adams: A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Henry B. Adams: Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Henry Steele Commager: Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

Henry Ward Beecher: There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

James Baldwin: Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

John Burroughs: Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

John Dewey: Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey: The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

John Dewey: I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.... But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.... Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience. My Pedagogic Creed, 1897

John F. Kennedy: Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars.

John Powell: The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

Jonathan Kozol: Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher

Lord Brougham: Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Lou Ann Walker: Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.

Maria Mitchell: Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

Maria Mitchell: We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Maria Montessori: Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Marian Wright Edelman: Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

Mark Twain: All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten. 1908, notebook

Mark Twain: Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

Mark Twain - attributed in error: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Mary Pettibone Poole: To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it, requires brains.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove blemishes from others without thinking evil of them.

Thomas Jefferson: Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Thucydides: History is Philosophy teaching by examples.

Unknown: Some children's answers to church school questions - from the Church of England:

Vernon Cooper: These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Virgil: As the twig is bent the tree inclines.

Virginia Woolf: To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.

Virginia Woolf: The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantlepiece forever.

Wendy Kaminer: Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

Will Durant: Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

William Butler Yeats: Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Ellery Channing: I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

William Ellery Channing: But the ground of a man's [sic] culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.

William James: Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.

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