Top 50 Best Quotes About Learning

by TeachThought Staff

The internet loves many things.

It loves cats, for example. Memes, too. It loves videos, which means it loves YouTube. It loves recipes and Wikipedia and alarming misdiagnoses on WebMd and, among other things (and getting to the point here), quotes. This is partly due to the succinct nature of a quote matching the attention span of readers inundated with unending feeds of new content.

The length of a quote often fits many of the more popular formats internet-wide, including Pinterest-friendly graphics, tweets, slideshows, and more.

So then, the quotes about learning. Below, we’ve hand-picked 52 of our favorite quotes about learning. We tried to choose from various thinkers, from teachers and writers to poets and farmers to philosophers and entrepreneurs to civil rights leaders and, in a few cases, even politicians.

Quotes About Learning: These quotes about learning necessarily reflect a particular view of learning, so in that way, this list is editorialized. At TeachThought, we focus on the human/critical thinking/innovation angle, and the quotes we chose mostly reflect that, just as we did in 50 Of The Best Quotes About Teaching.

We hope you find a few of them useful–as writing prompts, for example. Discussion starters, maybe. Or just as a reminder for you as an educator as to the nature and importance of your craft.

52 Of The Best Quotes About Learning

1. ‘The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.’ —Wendell Berry

2. ‘Any fool can know. The point is to understand.’ –Albert Einstein

3. ‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ –Benjamin Franklin

4. ‘It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.’ –Claude Bernard

5. ‘Learning is unifying seemingly divergent ideas and data.’ –Terrell Heick

6. ‘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

7. ‘All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.’ –Martin Fisher

8. ‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’ –Harry S Truman

9. ‘You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.’ –Lyndon B. Johnson

10. ‘I never learned from a man who agreed with me.’ –Robert A. Heinlein

See also 52 Of Our Favorite Inspirational Quotes For Teachers

11. ‘You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.’ –Richard Branson

12. ‘All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.’ –Immanuel Kant

13. ‘Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.’ –Socrates

14. ‘It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.’ –Albert Einstein

15. ‘By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.’ –Confucius

16. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing.’ –Alexander Pope

17. Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.’ –Immanuel Kant

18. ‘The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.’ –Voltaire

19. “To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.’ –Bertrand Russell

20. ‘It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.’ –Wendell Berry

21. ‘That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.’ –Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. ‘Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.’ –George Carlin

23. ‘A man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.’ –Albert Einstein

24. ‘If you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you haven’t learned anything.’ –Muhammad Ali

25. ‘Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.’ –John Dewey

See also 50 Of The Best Quotes About Education

26. ‘A problem well-put is half-solved.’ –John Dewey

27. ‘The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.’ –Dr. Seuss

28. ‘All learning has an emotional base.’ –Plato

29. Knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.’ -Plato

30. ‘Wisdom is learning what to overlook.’ William James

31. ‘Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.’ –George Evans

32. ‘Knowing is not enough; We must apply. Willing is not enough; We must do.’ –Bruce Lee

33. ‘Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest, Lend less than thou owest, Ride more than thou goest, Learn more than thou trowest, Set less than thou throwest.’ –William Shakespeare

34. ‘Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.’ –Benjamin Franklin

35. ‘We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.’ –Martin Luther King, Jr.

36. ‘Collaboration allows us to know more than we are capable of knowing ourselves.’ –Paul Solarz

37. ‘Towering genius disdains a beaten path.’ Abraham Lincoln

38. ‘Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.’ –Mark Twain

39. ‘Dialogue cannot exist without humility.’ –Paulo Freire

40. Development is a series of rebirths.’ –Maria Montessori

41. ‘Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.’ –Oliver Wendell Holmes

42. ‘It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.’ –Wendell Berry

43. ‘Even the genius asks questions.’ –Tupac Shakur

44. ‘Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.’ –Madeline Hunter

45. ‘What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.’ –Buddha

46. ‘Transfer is important, but think first about the learner, then about their native environments. Then, further, let’s hope for the self-initiated application of knowledge. Unprompted. Unformatted. The spontaneous, personal, and creative application of understanding in dynamic physical and digital environments.’ –Terry Heick

47. ‘The human mind is our fundamental resource.’ –John F. Kennedy

48. ‘All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.’ –Carl Sagan

49. ‘The quieter you become, the more you can hear.’ –Buddha

50. ‘Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.’ –Stephen Hawking

51. ‘Ideas without action aren’t ideas. They’re regrets.’ –Steve Jobs

52. ‘It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

53. ‘The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.’–Wendell Berry

54. ‘There are four powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses sight, hearing, and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.’ –Leonardo Da Vinci

52 Of The Best Quotes About Learning