101 Learning Quotes

Embarking on a learning journey requires inspiration and motivation – and what better way to ignite that spark than through insightful and thought-provoking quotes? In this blog post, we've meticulously curated a collection of the top 101 learning quotes that transcend time and space, providing wisdom from pioneers, educators, and thought leaders. Whether you are a student, teacher, or lifelong learner, these quotes are sure to resonate, offering new perspectives and spurring you on toward your educational goals. Dive in and let these powerful words fuel your passion for knowledge and growth.

1. “If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.” - Christine de Pizan

2. “The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

3. “We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.” - Frank Herbert

4. “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” - Eric Hoffer

5. “My new favorite quote is, "Feed kids Cokes and french fries and you get an obesity crisis. Feed them mental junk food and you get non-readers and poor thinkers.” - Joy Hakim

6. “Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” - Abigail Adams

7. “The greatest wisdom consists in knowing one's own follies.” - Madeleine De Souvre Sable

8. “...learning always occurs in a context of taking action, and they value engagement and experience as the most effective strategies for deep learning.” - Richard DuFour

9. “Change is the end result of all true learning.” - Leo Buscaglia

10. “He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

11. “No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” - Khalil Gibran

12. “I learned the bad guys are not always bad, the good guys are not always good, and to quote Captain Barbossa, the parameters are like rules, mostly guidelines. And that it takes a little bit of bad boy to fight the evil in the world.--Terri Mitchell” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

13. “At the end of your lives you will not be judged by academic successes, the degrees or diplomas earned, the positions held, the material wealth acquired, or power and prestige, but rather on the basis of what you have become as persons and what you are in conduct and character.” - Howard W. Hunter

14. “If you have no faith in yourself, then have faith in the things you call truth. You know what must be done. You may not have courage or trust or understanding or the will to do it, but you know what must be done. You can't turn back. There is now answer behind you. You fear what you cannot name. So look at it and find a name for it. Turn your face forward and learn. Do what must be done.-Deth to Morgon, Prince of Hed-” - Patricia A. McKillip

15. “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.” - Abraham Lincoln

16. “These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.” - Anthony de Mello

17. “to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.” - Stephen R. Covey

18. “What you keep before your eyes will affect you.” - Joel Osteen

19. “Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that is hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.” - David Williamson Shaffer

20. “The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.” - David Williamson Shaffer

21. “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.” - Joe Abercrombie

22. “With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.” - Ezra Pound

23. “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” - Eric Hoffer

24. “Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.” - Paulo Coelho

25. “Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man’s nature shall change; nor do I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for ‘tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world’s.” - Chico Kidd

26. “[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.” - Alan Bennett

27. “Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

28. “One thing I learned in here is the past is for learning. It's not for punishing others or yourself. It's not for dwelling on and getting angry about things you can't change. It's for learning how to do better in the rest of your life. And being grateful you get another chance to try and do better.” - Nicole Green

29. “Sharing will enrich everyone with more knowledge.” - Ana Monnar

30. “Any fool can write, we start learning it at school at the age of three....” - Pandora Poikilos

31. “Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.” - Brandon Sanderson

32. “When you feel life at crossroads,you need higher perspective view.” - Toba Beta

33. “There are all kinds of ignorance in the world. Education, learning to read and write, doesn't necessarily give us knowledge. We have to learn to use our minds to see what is really happening.” - Linda Leaming

34. “To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.” - John Burroughs

35. “Books are never harmless...they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future.” - Peter Prange

36. “It does not matter where you go and what you study, what matters most is what you share with yourself and the world.” - Santosh Kalwar

37. “My words itch at your ears till you understand them” - Walt Whitman

38. “Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.” - William Howard Taft

39. “Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” - John Ruskin

40. “We are all failures- at least the best of us are.” - J.M. Barrie

41. “There is no one who would not rather appear to know than to be taught.” - Quintilian

42. “We all mess up. It's what we learn from our mistakes that matters.” - Lauren Myracle

43. “The objective of learning is not necessarily to remember. It may even be salutary to forget. It is only when we forget the early pains and struggles of forming letters that we acquire the capacity for writing. The adult does not remember all the history s/he learned but s/he may hope to have acquired a standard of character and conduct, a sense of affairs and a feeling of change and development in culture. Naturally there is nothing against having a well-stocked mind provided it does not prevent the development of other capacities. But it is still more important to allow knowledge to sink into one in such a way that it becomes fruitful for life; this best done when we feel deeply all we learn. For the life of feeling is less conscious, more dream-like, than intellectual activity and leads to the subconscious life of will where the deep creative capacities of humanity have their being. It is from this sphere that knowledge can emerge again as something deeply significant for life. It is not what we remember exactly, but what we transform which is of real value to our lives. In this transformation the process of forgetting, of allowing subjects to sink into the unconscious before "re-membering" them is an important element.” - Henning Hansmann

44. “History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.” - Will & Ariel durant

45. “When I was a little girl, everything in the world fell into either of these two categories: wrong or right. Black or white. Now that I am an adult, I have put childish things aside and now I know that some things fall into wrong and some things fall into right. Some things are categorized as black and some things are categorized as white. But most things in the world aren't either! Most things in the world aren't black, aren't white, aren't wrong, aren't right, but most of everything is just different. And now I know that there's nothing wrong with different, and that we can let things be different, we don't have to try and make them black or white, we can just let them be grey. And when I was a child, I thought that God was the God who only saw black and white. Now that I am no longer a child, I can see, that God is the God who can see the black and the white and the grey, too, and He dances on the grey! Grey is okay.” - C. JoyBell C.

46. “Assessment in this spirit does not concern assignment of grades or evaluation of whether instruction was effective. It's assessment designed squarely to feed into the learning process and make the learning stronger.” - David N. Perkins

47. “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

48. “LSD stands out for learning to slow down.” - Santosh Kalwar

49. “In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.” - Marjorie Spock

50. “People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.” - Stephen King

51. “When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.” - Criss Jami

52. “I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.” - Criss Jami

53. “Let's not grow with our roots in the ground.” - Criss Jami

54. “Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.” - C. JoyBell C.

55. “Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?” - H. Rider Haggard

56. “Maybe we were all destined to just keep doing the same stupid things, over and over again, never really learning a single thing.” - Sarah Dessen

57. “If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.” - Jerome K. Jerome

58. “A different species a different set of values a world completely unlike your own. There is a feeling you can only get when you meet the unknown and open your mind. - Nakajima (Gin no Saji)” - Hiromu Arakawa

59. “Either you came in here a swimmer or you'd better be a really fast learner” - Suzanne Collins

60. “Why is it we must suffer the loss of something so dear before we realize what a treasure we had?Why must the sun be darkened before we feel how genuinely impossible it is to live without its warmth?Why within the misery of absence does love grow by such bounds?Why must life be this way?It is a strange existence where such suffering makes us far better people.” - Richelle Goodrich

61. “Wenn du verlierst, verliere nicht den Lerneffekt.” - Dalai Lama XIV

62. “Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.” - Rosabeth Moss Kantor

63. “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.” - Benjamin Franklin

64. “Will raised both eyebrows. 'Well, you learn a new thing everyday,' he said reflectively.'In your case, that's no exaggeration,' Halt said, completely straight-faced.” - John Flanagan

65. “I bargained with Life for a penny, and Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;Life is a just employer. He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have willingly paid” - Jessie B. Rittenhouse

66. “The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.” - John Medina

67. “I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don't want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It's high time that I accept all the great things about me.” - C. JoyBell C.

68. “We must admit that simply knowing the contents of the Bible is not a sure route to spiritual growth. There is an aweful assumption in evangelical churches that if we can just get the Word of God into people's heads, then the Spirit of God will apply it to their hearts. That assumption is aweful, not because the Spirit never does what the assumption supposes, but because it excused pastors and leaders from the responsibility to tangle with people's lives. Many remain safely hidden behind pulpits, hopelessly out of touch with the struggles of their congregations, proclaiming the Scriptures with a pompous accuracy that touches no one. Pulpits should provide bridges, not barriers, to life-changing relationships.” - Larry Crabb

69. “Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices!...” - Carlo Collodi

70. “Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.” - Terry Pratchett

71. “By all means, learn beyond the classroom. In the end, thats all that will matter” - Gossy Ukanwoke

72. “I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two internal antagonists.” - Nikos Kazantzakis

73. “Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?” - Idries Shah

74. “I miss being a student," said Abdul Wahid. "I miss the passionate discussions with my friends, and most of all the hours among the books.” - Helen Simonson

75. “I remember loving pencils. I was fond of paper. I loved the small of textbooks. I loved the way the light from a desk lamp was bright on a page. I loved the smell of fresh-cut grass. It was a thing everybody loved, but there was no shame in being that much like everybody else, in sharing that.” - Frederick Barthelme

76. “Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.” - Isocrates

77. “If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas” - Dean Koontz

78. “It was OK to need people; she was learning that. You just had to be careful.” - Nicole Richie

79. “Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

80. “You have to be silent, but ready” - Rosen Topuzov

81. “We've been had.” - Rosen Topuzov

82. “If everything is done for me... how will I ever learn?” - John Flanagan

83. “When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.” - APJ ABDUL KALAM

84. “As you have seen the treachery of love because of me, I have seen my cruelty because of you. But you learned mercy from me, and from you I learned resilience. As you came to understand me enough to know the value I placed on selfless love, I understand your nature better.” - D. Morgenstern

85. “I have had to learn the simplest thingslast. Which made for difficulties.” - Charles Olsen

86. “We attract what we're meant to because we're aware & self-empowered enough to choose most of the time. Other times we have lessons to learn” - jay woodman

87. “No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.” - Murasaki Shikibu

88. “But one of the things I have learned during the time I have spent in the United States is an old African American saying: Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference.” - Marcus Samuelsson

89. “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you can't learn any other way.--Mark Twain” - Tony-Paul de Vissage

90. “They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.” - Ally Condie

91. “re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.[From the preface to Leaves Grass]” - Walt Whitman

92. “One day," she told us, "you'll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be.” - Michael Morpurgo

93. “Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard. He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that no pinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality rather than by their consonance with preconceptions.” - Bertrand Russell

94. “That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

95. “Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to.” - Thanhha Lai

96. “By means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning.” - Nikos Kazantzakis

97. “Life moves forward, not backward, and it would be wise to listen to what change has to say.” - Bryant McGill

98. “There are possibilities that exist beyond our present "knowing," and to see those possibilities, we must abandon that which makes us feel safe.” - Bryant McGill

99. “Remember when your curiosity inspired your investigative mind to explore and learn… you weren’t bogged down with resentment, cynicism, and emotional baggage… just think about how great it would be to return to that mindset of unencumbered learning and adventurous living… you are just one choice away from that life… choose to let go of the infertile past… go live your adventure!” - Steve Maraboli

100. “One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.” - Idries Shah

101. “When scientific conversations cease, then dogma rather than knowledge begins to rule the day.” - Jaak Panksepp