Sunday, July 18, 2010 – Lessons Not Learned
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out. ~ Will Rogers
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. ~ Confucius
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. ~ Oscar Wilde
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth. ~ Will Rogers
A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. ~ Frederick Douglass
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone. ~ Albert Camus
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. ~ Margaret Mead
The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all. ~ Harry S. Truman
Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ~ Douglas Adams
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a “learning experience.” Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a “learning experience.” It makes me feel less stupid. ~ P. J. O’Rourke
It’s a weird sensation to be mad and learning at the same time. ~ Jeff Foxworthy
Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies. ~ Leon Trotsky
Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. ~ Umberto Eco
Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them. ~ Joseph Addison
Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them. ~ Lord Chesterfield
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning. ~ Jean Baudrillard
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book. ~ Edward Gibbon
Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day. ~ William Allingham
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. ~ Andre Breton
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning. ~ B. B. King
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring. ~ Robertson Davies
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. ~ Mark Twain
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
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. ~ H. G. Wells
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
Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression. ~ Haim Ginott
Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later. ~ Dana Stewart Scott
The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. ~ Henry S. Haskins
Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. ~ C. S. Lewis
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. ~ Mark Twain
A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. ~ Brander Matthews
It don’t make much difference what you study, so long as you don’t like it. ~ Finley Peter Dunne
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. ~ Ezra Pound
Just Above Sunset 