I’ve been collecting quotations for years and figured I’d put my collections online for others to use as they wish. Enjoy these quotations, use the comment form to share any quotations about learning you don’t find here.

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

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.
- Al McGuire

Education is learning what you didn’t know you didn’t know.
- George Boas

I quit school in the fifth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it but because I couldn’t spell it.
- Rocky Graziano

Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.
- Heinrich Heine

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
- Georg Christopher Lichtenberg

Any place that anyone young can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.
- Al Capp

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
- George Santayana

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
- Mark Twain

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
- Douglas Adams

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.
- John Ciardi

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
- Jonathan Swift

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
- E.B. White

Every child is born a genius.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.
- Anna Freud

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau

The invention of IQ does a great disservice to creativity in education.
- Joel Hildebrand

It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
- Truman Capote

The high IQ has become the American equivalent of the Legion of Honor, positive proof of a child’s intellectual aristocracy…. It has become more important to be a smart kid than a good kid or even a healthy kid.
- Sam Levenson

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
- H.L. Mencken

What distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
- Sigmund Freud

I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
- Lisa Alther

It has yet to be proved that intelligence has any survival value.
- Arthur C. Clarke

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, or course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
- Albert Einstein

Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or they didn’t.
- L.L. Hendren

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain

Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.
- G.K. Chesterton

Tim was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages: so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride in.
- Benjamin Franklin

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
- Oscar Wilde

Education is what happens to the person, not what comes out of the mouth of the educator.
- Miles Horton

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

He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.
- George Simmel

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durant

To be able to be caught up in the world of thought
- that is being educated.
- Edith Hamilton

The things taught in school are not an education but a means to an education.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
- Oscar Wilde

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
- Vernon Law

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
- Peter Drucker

There’s nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won’t aggravate.
- Anonymous

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

Wisdom has never made a bigot, but learning has.
- Josh Billings

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
- Samuel Butler

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.
- Robert Byrne

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

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.
- Desiderius Erasmus

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
- Henry Ford

Education is the process by which we discover that learning brings quality to our lives.
- William Glasser

I gave my life to learning how to live. Now that I have organized it all it’s just about over.
- Sandra Hochman

I’ve known countless people who were reservoirs of learning yet never had a thought.
- Wilson Mizner

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
- Alexander Pope

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. A little learning is a dangerous thing.
- Fred Rogers

The real challenge is not to get people to remember more, but to get them to understand better. We’re just now beginning to be able to show what we can implement with technological tools. I think our interest at Apple is to be the provider of the instruments that will help educators and students create and entirely new kind of learning than what we have now.
- John Sculley

You should keep learning as long as there is something you do not know.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
- George Bernard Shaw

He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.
- Sydney Smith

I never taught language for the purpose of teaching it; but invariably used language as a medium for the communication of thought; thus the learning of language was coincident with the acquisition of knowledge.
- Annie Sullivan

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, and learning, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!
- Jonathan Swift

Learning why an idea fails is just as important as knowing why it works.
- Roman Szpur

What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
- Mark Twain

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
- William Allen White

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

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.
- Robert Byrne

To Learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner.
- George Leonard

The key to all learning is to be found at the point of intersection between the learner and the learning environment.
- George Leonard

The most awesome learning feat on this planet – a child’s acquisition of spoken language – occurs in the absence of any formal instruction.
- George Leonard

If the methods of most schools were used to teach young children to talk, the world would soon be engulfed in silence and confusion.
- George Leonard

The very fast learner is a greater threat to the conventional classroom than the very slow learner.
- George Leonard

Most schools function – with stunning efficiency – to stop real learning.
- George Leonard

The ultimate purpose of all non-trivial learning is to increase your perception of what you don’t know.
- George Leonard

A certain naivete is prerequisite to all learning. A certain optimism is prerequisite to all action.
- George Leonard

To be a learner, you have to be willing to be a fool – that is, to stay open to new experience, to take pratfalls.
- George Leonard

To learn and keep on learning prodigiously from birth to death is what sets us off from the other animals. It is our destiny on this planet.
- George Leonard

The creative capacity of the human brain is, for all practical purposes, infinite.
- George Leonard

The best learning is ecstatic.
- George Leonard

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
- Alexander Pope

America is the best half-educated country in the world.
- Nicholas Murray Butler

One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius.
- Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninty-nine percent perspiration.
- Thomas Alva Edison

Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?
- Sydney J. Harris

A good education is the next best thing to a pushy mother.
- Charles Schulz

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
- George Santayana

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part time, the insane asylums would be hilled with mothers.
- Edgar W. Howe

The only people who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
- G.K. Chesterton

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
- Marian Wright Edelman

The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children.
- Louis Jahannot

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
- Alexandre Dumas

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
- Kenneth B. Clark

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
- George Bernard Shaw

All I ever really need to know I learned in Kindergarten.
- Robert Fulghum

I only went to the third grade because my father only went to the fourth and I didn’t want to pass him.
- Dizzy Dean

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
- James Baldwin

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
- Alec Bourne

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.
- Robert Frost

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
- H. L. Mencken

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
- Laurence Peter

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
- Mark Twain

Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings.
- Lou Ann Walker

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
- T.H. Huxley

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
- Galileo Galilei

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
- Katharine Whitehorn

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
- Bobby Knight

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
- George Bernard Shaw

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
- Robert Benchley

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

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
- Clarence Darrow