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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.

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Most quoted on learning:

I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil.

William Shenstone

Learn to live, and live to learn,
Ignorance like a fire doth burn,
Little tasks make large return.

Bayard Taylor

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from learning to be wise.
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail —
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Samuel Johnson The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)

We need to learn from the most politically bold and creative among us. (We also need to offer concrete solidarity and support to those we learn from, lest learning from mean ripping off.)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
Their shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism (1711)

The Lord of Learning who upraised mankind
From being silent brutes to singing men.

Charles Godfrey Leland

He [Steele] was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

O this learning, what a thing it is!

William Shakespeare

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Next these, learn’d Jonson, in this list I bring,
Who had drunk deep of the Pierian spring.

Michael Drayton

Well, for your favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.

William Shakespeare

The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.

John Holt

Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toil
O'er books consum'd the midnight oil?

John Gay

Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field;
The arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave.

Alexander Pope

When the learned take neither revelation nor reason for their guide, they fall into as great, and worse errors, than the unlearned; for they only make use of that system of Divine wisdom, which should guide them into truth, when they can find or pick out any thing that will suit their purpose, or that they can pervert to such—the very means of leading themselves and others into error.

Ottobah Cugoano Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787)

Yet, he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault;
The village all declar'd how much he knew,
'Twas certain he could write and cipher too.

Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village (1770)

Ask of the Learn'd the way? The Learn'd are blind;
This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind;
Some place the bliss in action, some in ease,
Those call it Pleasure, and Contentment these.

Alexander Pope

The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,
For Tories own no argument but force:
With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent,
For Whigs admit no force but argument.

William Browne

The languages, especially the dead,
The sciences, and most of all the abstruse,
The arts, at least all such as could be said
To be the most remote from common use,
In all these he was much and deeply read.

Lord Byron

Thou art an heyre to fayre lyving, that is nothing, if thou be disherited of learning, for better were it to thee to inherite righteousnesse then riches, and far more seemly were it for thee to haue thy Studie full of bookes, then thy pursse full of mony.

John Lyly

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