EDUCATION QUOTES

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. And root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir !  - Charles John Huffam  Dickens

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation. - Marcus Tullius  Cicero

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. - George Berbard Shaw

A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn. - John Lubbock (Lord Avebury )

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge. - Charles Babbage

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong. - Russel Wayne Baker

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head. - Eric  Hoffer

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. - Martin H. Fischer

As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness. - Isidor Isaac Rabi

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. - Alfred  Whitney  Griswold

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. - John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

Education is an organic necessity of a human being. - Horace  Mann

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. - Carl Sagan

Experience of actual fact either teaches fools or abolishes them. - Thomas Carlyle

First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place.- Hippocrates.

How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ... and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education. - Henri  Poincare

I turn my eyes to the schools & universities of Europe
And there behold the loom of Locke whose woof rages dire,
Washed by the water-wheels of Newton. Black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation; cruel works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.

- William  Blake

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. ... What business has science and capitalism got, bringing ail these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them ! - Henrik  Johan  Ibsen

If the term education may be understood in so large a sense as to include all that belongs to the improvement of the mind, either by the acquisition of the knowledge of others or by increase of it through its own exertions, we learn by them what is the kind of education science offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing — not to despise the small beginnings, for they precede of necessity all great things in the knowledge of science, either pure or applied. - Michael  Faraday

If the Weismann idea triumphs, it will be in a sense a triumph of fatalism; for, according to it, while we may indefinitely improve the forces of our education and surroundings, and this civilizing nurture will improve the individuals of each generation, its actual effects will not be cumulative as regards the race itself, but only as regards the environment of the race; each new generation must start de novo, receiving no increment of the moral and intellectual advance made during the lifetime of its predecessors. It would follow that one deep, almost instinctive motive for a higher life would be removed if the race were only superficially benefited by its nurture, and the only possible channel of actual improvement were in the selection of the fittest chains of race plasma. - Henry  Fairfield  Osborn

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little. - Herbert Spencer

If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow. - John  Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing. -  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable and skilled in the practice of his own profession. -  Pope John XXIII

It is curious to reflect on how history repeats itself the world over. Why, I remember the same thing was done when I was a boy on the Mississippi River. There was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.
It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. He'll never get fat. I believe it is better to support schools than jails. - Mark Twain

Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a poor patching. We are always a little late… We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education… We must begin higher up, namely in Education. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Medicine, like every useful science, should be thrown open to the observation and study of all. It should, in fact, like law and every important science, be made part of the primary education of the people. … We should at once explode the whole machinery of mystification and concealment—wigs, gold canes, and the gibberish of prescriptions—which serves but as a cloak to ignorance and legalized murder. - Anonymous

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

People are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. - Bertrand Russell

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. - Sir Francis Bacon

Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level. - Aldous (Leonard) Huxley

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one. - Lucius  Annaeus Seneca

Some people get an education without going to college; the rest get it after they get out. - Anonymous

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one. - George Bernard Shaw

The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world. - Ralph  Waldo  Emerson

The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty—not marble floors and foundations. - Martin H. Fischer

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space. - Arthur C. (Charles) Clarke

The issue is not to teach [a child] the sciences, but to give him the taste for loving them. - Jean Jacques  Rousseau

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it. - John Locke

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. - Jean Piaget

There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning. - John Calvin Coolidge

There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education. - John  Stuart Mill

They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art. - Sir Francis Bacon

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them. - Thomas Henry Huxley

To the distracting occupations belong especially my lecture courses which I am holding this winter for the first time, and which now cost much more of my time than I like. Meanwhile I hope that the second time this expenditure of time will be much less, otherwise I would never be able to reconcile myself to it, even practical (astronomical) work must give far more satisfaction than if one brings up to B a couple more mediocre heads which otherwise would have stopped at A. - Carl friedrich Gauss

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education. - Mark Twain

What is a good definition ? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils. - Henri  Poincare

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman. - George Bernard Shaw

’T is education forms the common mind:
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

Alexander Pope