Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Learning Quotes
A short list with no flagged entries. Shakespeare, John Gay, Goldsmith, Pope and Bacon each have a few. Bacon’s Meditationes Sacræ (1597) is the best-known: reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) urges the reader to pause a while from learning to be wise. Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1911) defines learning as the kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
For more on teaching and schools, see Education.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.
Much learning shows how little mortals know;
Much wealth, how little worldlings can enjoy.
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Not merely giving the mind a slight tincture but a thorough and perfect dye.
Learn, O youth, virtue from me and true labor; fortune from others.
Here the heart
May give a useful lesson to the head,
And learning wiser grow without his books.
Were man to live coeval with the sun,
The patriarch-pupil would be learning still.
It is the worst of madness to learn what has to be unlearnt.
All wish to be learned, but no one is willing to pay the price.