If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. ~Thich Nhat Hanh

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LEARNING/TEACHING

1.    Learning is a process of active engagement with experience. It is what people do when they want to make sense of the world. It may involve an increase in skills, knowledge, understanding, values and the capacity to reflect. Effective learning leads to change, development and a desire to learn more.

2.    A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad. - Bob Edwards

3.    A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. ~Alexander Pope 1688-1744;

4.    A room without books is like a body without a soul. ~Marcus Tullius Cicero

5.    A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.  ~Chinese Proverb

6.    A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. - Thomas Carruthers

7.    All learning begins with the simple phrase, "I don't know". - I don't know.

8.    All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.  ~Martin H. Fischer

9.    Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut. ~Ernest Hemingway

10.  An educated person is one who has finally discovered that there are some questions to which nobody has the answer. ~Unknown

11.  An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. ~Benjamin Franklin

12.  Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

13.  Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. - Arthur C. Clarke

14.  Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.  ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

15.  Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there's no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done. - Rudolph Flesch

16.  Don't just learn the tricks of the trade. Learn the trade. - James Bennis

17.  Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. - B. F. Skinner

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

19.  Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.  That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.  ~Thomas Szasz

20.  Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. - Oscar Wilde, “Lord Fermor, in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891)

21.  Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach. - Albert Einstein

22.  For learning to take place with any kind of efficiency students must be motivated. To be motivated, they must become interested. And they become interested when they are actively working on projects which they can relate to their values and goals in life. - Gus Tuberville, President, William Penn College

23.  Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study.  Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life.  ~Henry L. Doherty

24.  Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.  You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.  ~Vilfredo Pareto

25.  Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. - John Dewey

26.  He who learns but does not think is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger. - Confucius

27.  He will have to learn, I know, that all people are not just- that all men and women are not true. Teach him that for every scoundrel there is a hero that for every enemy there is a friend. Let him learn early that the bullies are the easiest people to lick. ~Abraham Lincoln

28.  His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken.  ~H.G. Wells

29.  Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams

30.  I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.  ~Winston Churchill

31.  I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything.  ~George Herbert Palmer

32.  I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.  ~Bernard Keble Sandwell

33.  I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think - Socrates

34.  I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.  ~Abraham Lincoln

35.  I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. ~Dudley Field Malone

36.  I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.  ~Dudley Field Malone

37.  I have never let my schooling interfere with my education - Mark Twain

38.  I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. ~Chinese Proverb

39.  I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. - Albert Einstein

40.  I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come. ~Abraham Lincoln

41.  If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.  ~Russell Hoban

42.  If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. ~Derek Bok

43.  In Chinese, the two symbols which express the word “learning” are “studying” and “practicing constantly”. You can never say that you’ve learned something, only that you are practicing. ~Dawna Markova

44.  In the long history of humankind ~and animalkind too those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. ~Charles Darwin

45.  It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well. - Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-81), Swiss philosopher, poet. 

46.  It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.  ~Jacob Bronowski

47.  It is noble to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble! - Mark Twain

48.  It is not hard to learn more.  What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.  ~Martin H. Fischer

49.  It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is he knows everything. - Joyce Cary

50.  It takes two to speak the truth,--one to speak, and another to hear. - Henry David Thoreau

51.  Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do. - Goethe

52.  Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.  ~Dana Stewart Scott

53.  Learn avidly. Question repeatedly what you have learned. Analyze it carefully. Then put what you have learned into practice intelligently. - Confucius

54.  Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.  ~Chinese Proverb

55.  Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. - Richard Bach, Illusions: Reflections of a Reluctant Messiah.

56.  Learning is like rowing upstream:  not to advance is to drop back.  ~Chinese Proverb

57.  Learning is not a spectator sport. - D. Blocher

58.  Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death. - Confucius (551-479 B.C.)

59.  Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. ~Samuel Butler, English author

60.  Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Gandhi

61.  Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Gandhi

62.  Live to learn and you will learn to live. ~Portugese proverb

63.  Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

64.  No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world.  ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

65.  Nothing is as frightening as ignorance in action. - Goethe

66.  Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight. - Thomas Calyle, Scottish essayist and historian

67.  People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.  ~Bill Vaughan

68.  Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. ~Thomas H. Huxley

69.  Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.  ~Alexander Pope

70.  The ability to learn faster than the competition is often the only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have. ~Aire de Geus

71.  The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. - Mark Van Doren, poet

72.  The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.  ~Lesley Conger

73.  The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher. - John Holt

74.  The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. - Ayn Rand

75.  The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler

76.  The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  ~Alvin Toffler

77.  The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.  ~John Lubbock

78.  The man who can make hard things easy is the educator. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

79.  The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after. - Newton D. Baker

80.  The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.  ~Henry S. Haskins

81.  The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. ~William Blake

82.  The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires - William Arthur Ward

83.  The most important part of teaching = to teach what it is to know. - Simone Weil (1909-43), French philosopher

84.  The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience. - Carl Rogers

85.  The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience. - Carl Rogers

86.  The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." - John Powell

87.  The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development. ~Confucius

88.  The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.  ~Mortimer Adler

89.  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. - Marcel Proust, French novelist

90.  The teacher if he is indeed wise does not teach bid you to enter the house of wisdom but leads you to the threshold of your own mind. - Kahlil Gilbran, Syrian symbolist poet and painter

91.  The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught. - Luc Vauvenargues,

92.  The way to regulate well in times of great uncertainty is by learning rather than controlling. Not learning the answers to known questions that serve the intent to control, but learning what questions about balancing and optimizing now merit asking, and then learning how those questions might be answered provisionally — until the present moment emerges into a new context of questions. ~Donald N. Michael

93.  The word "crisis" is from the Greek, meaning "a moment to decide." The recurrent moments of crisis and decision when understood, are growth junctures, points of initiation which mark a release from one state of being and a growth into the next. ~Jill Purce

94.  There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

95.  There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning. ~Christopher Morley

96.  There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul. - Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), British novelist.

97.  Time invested in improving ourselves cuts down on time wasted in disapproving of others. ~Unknown

98.  To learn, you must want to be taught. -Proverbs 12:1

99.  To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully. - Tyron Edwards

100.        Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. - Mark Twain “Pudd'nhead Wilson

101.        We Learn by Doing
Not many years ago a man began to play the cello.

Now, most people would say that what he was doing was “learning to play” the cello.

But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exists two very different processes: ~1 learning to play the cello; and ~2 playing the cello.

They imply that one will do the first until they have completed it, at which point they will stop the first process and begin the second. In short, this man will go on “learning to play” and then will “begin to play.”

Of course, this is nonsense.

There are not two processes, but one. We learn to something by doing it. There is no other way. ~John Holt

102.        We learn from history that we do not learn from history. ~Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel

103.        We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.  ~Lloyd Alexander

104.        We must do all in our power to educate the public, for I believe that in the end only a change of heart is really effective. ~Ruth Harrison

105.        We presuppose two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that man can learn it. ~John W. Campbell, Jr.

106.        Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one. ~Lord Chesterfield

107.        When the student is ready, the teacher will come. ~ Buddhist Proverb

108.        When you know something, say what you know. When you don't know something, say that you don't know. That is knowledge." - Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius)

109.        Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. - John Cotton Dana

110.        Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn. - William J. Durant

111.        You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford

112.        You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself. - Galileo Galilei

113.        You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.  ~Marvin Minsky

114.        You have learned something.  That always feels at first as if you had lost something.  ~H.G. Wells

115.        You learn something every day if you pay attention.  ~Ray LeBlond

116.        Men are four:

He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool - shun him;

He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple - teach him;

He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep - wake him;

He who knows and knows he knows, hi is wise - follow him! ~Lady Burton

117.        The Learning Tree

Come, you and I,

Let us sit in the shade of this tree

we've grown from the seeds of our yearning.

For in the long ago

we were friends not yet met,

but sowing the seeds of our dreams

in the common earth

of life's longing for itself.

And with our growing, learning,

together, alone,

we nurtured and nudged each other

through uncertainty, surprise,

impatience and joy;

destination unsure, awareness unfolding.

And so we grow

we change, we learn,

building wisdom and relationships as we go;

looking inside, outside,

affirming, questioning, challenging

who, what and why we are.

And so,

if tributes turn to tears,

please know they fall

on the beating heart

of this tree of life and learning;

yours, mine, ours. ~r.brazier