Quotes about education

There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

— John Adams

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.

— Joseph Addison

Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors.

— Louisa May Alcott

Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.

— Maya Angelou

Education is the best provision for old age.

— Aristotle

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

— Aristotle

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

— Aristotle

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

— Aristotle

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

— Aristotle

Educate people without religion and you make them but clever devils.

— Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley

The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

— James Baldwin

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

— James Baldwin

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

— James Baldwin

Education is the knowledge of how to use the whole of oneself. Many men use but one or two faculties out of the score with which they are endowed. A man is educated who knows how to make a tool of every faculty--how to open it, how to keep it sharp, and how to apply it to all practical purposes.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools

— William John Bennett

Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it. [Proverbs 22:6]

— Bible

Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

— Ambrose Bierce

Education is not a discipline at all. Half vocational, half an emptiness dressed up in garments borrowed from philosophy, psychology, literature.

— Edward Blishen

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

— Allan Bloom

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

— Allan Bloom

In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life --subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality --no human being's education can have a safe foundation.

— Phyllis Bottome

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

— Alec Bourne

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

— Omar Nelson Bradley

There's a new tribunal now higher than God's --The educated man s!

— Robert Browning

We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

— Dr. Jerome Brunner

Parents have a right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children.

— Patrick Buchanan

The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt.

— Robert Buzzell

Mentoring is all about people -- it's about caring, about relationships and sensitivity. As it becomes increasingly in vogue it is becoming too formulated -- concerned with performance metrics, critical success factors, investment and spending. It'll be a disaster.

— Rene Carayol

We must do better or perish as the nation we know today.

— Lauro Cavazos

Life at university, with its intellectual and inconclusive discussions at a postgraduate level is on the whole a bad training for the real world. Only men of very strong character surmount this handicap.

— Paul Chambers

Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.

— Raymond Chandler

He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man.

— William Ellery Channing

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.

— Chuang Tzu

Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively.

— R.D. Clyde

It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.

— William Cobbett

Better build schoolrooms for the boy, than cells and gibbets for the man.

— Eliza Cook

Education is the fire-proofer of emotions.

— Frank Crane

The real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.

— Mandell Creighton

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.

— John Dewey

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

— Philip K. Dick

On the education of the people of this country the fate of the country depends.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

— Benjamin Disraeli

There is no education like adversity.

— Benjamin Disraeli

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing, but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

— J. Frank Doble

Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— Peter F. Drucker

Education can no longer be the sole property of the state.

— Peter F. Drucker

It don't make much difference what you study, so long as you don't like it.

— Finley Peter Dunne

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.

— William J. Durant

Education ought everywhere to be religious education. Parents are bound to employ no instructors who will instruct their children religiously. To commit children to the care of irreligious persons is to commit lambs to the superintendency of wolves.

— Timothy Dwight

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

— Albert Einstein

Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance.

— Albert Einstein

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need. strangled the holy curious of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

— Albert Einstein

According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.

— Albert Einstein

Those who trust us educate us.

— George Eliot

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only the educated are free.

— Epictetus

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

— Edward Everett

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education

— Paul Karl Feyerabend

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

— Henry Fielding

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.

— Martin H. Fischer

The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one

— Malcolm S. Forbes

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

— Edward M. Forster

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

— Anatole France

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

— Anatole France

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

— Benjamin Franklin

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

— Robert Frost

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

— Robert Frost

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.

— David P. Gardner

America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.

— John W. Gardner

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

— John W. Gardner

Most owners of small businesses openly state that they believe in the value of skills and operational training. However, they also admit that they themselves undertake very little training, or offer only limited training to their employees, because of time restraints.

— Moshe Gerstenhaber

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

— Jean Giraudoux

They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

— Emma Goldman

We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.

— Remy De Gourmont

America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

— Billy Graham

The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.

— Paul E. Gray

We are commanded to love God with all our minds, as well as with all our hearts, and we commit a great sin if we forbid or prevent that cultivation of the mind in others which would enable them to perform this duty.

— Angelina Grimke

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

— Sir William Haley

Higher education must lead the march back to the fundamentals of human relationships, to the old discovery that is ever new, that man does not live by bread alone.

— John A. Hannah

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

— William Hazlitt

Education is the art of making man ethical.

— Georg Hegel

Much learning does not teach understanding.

— Heraclitus

Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning, theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!

— Alexander Herzen

Education is the ability to meet life's situations.

— Dr. John G. Hibben

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

— Napoleon Hill

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.

— John Holt

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

— Sam Houston

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

— Elbert Hubbard