69 Learning Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, the pursuit of knowledge remains a timeless endeavor. Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, the journey of learning is one that continually shapes our understanding and growth. With that in mind, we've curated a collection of the top 69 learning quotes to inspire and motivate you. These quotes, drawn from the wisdom of great thinkers, educators, and leaders, serve as a reminder of the power and beauty inherent in the quest for knowledge. Let these words ignite your passion for learning and encourage you to never stop exploring the vast expanse of human understanding.

1. “The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.” - B.B. King

2. “You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” - Azar Nafisi

3. “Ancora Imparo(Yet I am learning)” - Michelangelo

4. “A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.” - Sophocles

5. “I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.” - Martha Graham

6. “Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world's work, and the power to appreciate life.” - Brigham Young

7. “Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.” - Aristotle

8. “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” - Stanley Kubrick

9. “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” - Isaac Asimov

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

11. “[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism andcompromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting itinstead into meek subservience to authority.” - Walter Karp

12. “Tu as tout à apprendre, tout ce qui ne s'apprend pas: la solitude, l'indifférence, la patience, le silence. Tu dois te déshabituer de tout: d'aller à la rencontre de ceux que si longtemps tu as côtoyés, de prendre tes repas, tes cafés à la place que chaque jour d'autres ont retenue pour toi, ont parfois défendue pour toi, de traîner dans la complicité fade des amitiés qui n'en finissent pas de se survivre, dans la rancoeur opportuniste et lâche des liaisons qui s'effilochent.” - Georges Perec

13. “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.” - J. Krishnamurti

14. “I am learning, and I believe I shall do quite well.” - Shannon Drake

15. “I had a professor one time... He said, 'Class, you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here, so please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and He has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself. And, if on meeting someone, right away you recognize what they are, listen to them anyway'.” - Rich Mullins

16. “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.” - Ivan Illich

17. “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” - Hippocrates

18. “Every pain is a lesson.” - Frank Delaney

19. “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

20. “When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart.” - Charlotte Brontë

21. “Everything I know, I learned from dogs.” - Nora Roberts

22. “Learn the rules before you break them.” - Steven Taylor Goldsberry

23. “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

24. “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” - Oscar Wilde

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

26. “Failure isn't bad if it doesn't attack the heart. Success is all right if it doesn't go to the head.” - Grantland Rice

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

28. “A stumble may prevent a fall.” - Thomas Fuller

29. “Learn from history or you're doomed to repeat it.” - Jesse Ventura

30. “There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.” - Hermann Hesse

31. “No matter how righteous you are, no matter how carefully youcultivate the companionship of the Holy Ghost, there are vast amounts of knowledge which you need to acquireand which you are not going to receive through revelation.” - Rex E. Lee

32. “It doesn`t hurt to get more education.” - Donald Trump

33. “I heard this story once," she said, "where this bloke got locked up for years and years and he learned amazin' stuff about the universe and everythin' from another prisoner who was incredibly clever, and then he escaped and got his revenge.""What incredibly clever stuff do you know about the universe, Gytha Ogg?" said Granny."Bugger all," said Nanny cheerfully."Then we'd better bloody well escape right now.” - Terry Pratchett

34. “Cuando los zapatos aprietan, buena señal. Algo cambia ahí, algo que nos muestra, que sordamente nos pone, nos plantea. Por eso los monstruos son tan populares y los diarios se extasían con los terneros bicéfalos. ¡Qué oportunidades, qué esbozo de un gran salto hacia lo otro!” - Julio Cortazar

35. “Everything has happened before - not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called "the lessons of history," but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.” - Elizabeth Peters

36. “Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.” - Carl Sagan

37. “What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.” - Wallace Stegner

38. “The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.” - Paul Karl Feyerabend

39. “It's not him who's disturbed. But he likes to disturb others--to shake them out of their rut.” - Jostein Gaarder

40. “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.” - Ernest Hemingway

41. “I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they’re learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.” - C.A.R. Hoare

42. “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

43. “An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.” - Martha Nussbaum

44. “One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” - Frank Herbert

45. “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

46. “A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.” - Michael Marino

47. “Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.” - Terry Pratchett

48. “My life changed the day I moved beyond just wishing for things and I started earning them. That is the day I learned that we don't get what we wish for, we get what we work for.” - Steve Maraboli

49. “A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.” - Criss Jami

50. “A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

51. “worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).” - Mike Schmoker

52. “You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.” - Tom Hanks

53. “Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it?  That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

54. “Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.” - James Madison

55. “To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.” - Lori McWilliam Pickert

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

57. “Collaboration allows teachers to capture each other's fund of collective intelligence.” - Mike Schmoker

58. “Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to” - Edith Wharton

59. “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

60. “As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?” - Criss Jami

61. “What I learned on my own I still remember” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

62. “Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an “educator,” because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience.” - Siva Vaidhyanathan

63. “The Sufis are unanimous that a Guide (Sheikh) is absolutely essential, though never available on demand: 'the Sufis are not merchants'.” - Idries Shah

64. “Education is that process by which thought is opened out of the soul, and, associated with outward . . . things, is reflected back upon itself, and thus made conscious of its reality and shape. It is Self-Realization. As a means, therefore, of educating the soul out of itself, and mirroring forth its ideas, the external world offers the materials. This is the dim glass in which the senses are first called to display the soul, until, aided by the keener state of imagination . . . it separates those outward types of itself from their sensual connection, in its own bright mirror recognizes again itself, as a distinctive object in space and time, but out of it in existence, and painting itself upon these, as emblems of its inner and super-sensual life which no outward thing can fully portray. . . . A language is to be instituted between [the child’s] spirit and the surrounding scene of things in which he dwells. . . . He who is seeking to know himself, should be ever seeking himself in external things, and by so doing will he be best able to find, and explore his inmost light.” - Amos Bronson Alcott

65. “Education is not filling up a box but seeing what you can create with one and don't you ever forget that!” - Jill Telford

66. “A mind with questions is a mind open to understanding.” - Colleen Houck

67. “I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one's sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.” - jay woodman

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

69. “Regret for not learning; not for the mistakes you did.” - Garbyal