Archive

Quotes

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

—George Santayana, 1905

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

—Ezra Pound, 1934

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

—Mark Twain, 1897

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

—Leonard Cohen, 1970

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

—Frederick Douglass, 1852

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

—H.G. Wells, 1920

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

That which is evil is soon learned. 

—John Ray, 1670

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

—François Rabelais, 1533

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972