c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialists, protectionists and free-traders, inflationists and believers in the gold standard. He ought to be encouraged to read the best books of the various schools, as recommended by those who believe in them. This would teach him to weigh arguments and evidence, to know that no pinion is certainly right, and to judge men by their quality rather than by their consonance with preconceptions.
— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to.
— Thanhha Lai
By means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
Regret for not learning
—  not for the mistakes you did.
Life moves forward, not backward, and it would be wise to listen to what change has to say.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.
— Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Humility: The most quietly profound professor in the university of Christian living.
— Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power
There are possibilities that exist beyond our present "knowing," and to see those possibilities, we must abandon that which makes us feel safe.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Lifelong learning is like a never ending personal revolution.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
After the woman left, Gran, staring out back at the Zebra Forest, said to me, 'I'm a liar, I'll admit. But I pride myself on being a really good liar. That's part of my educational philosophy, too, Annie B. Mark that down. Lesson one: If you're going to do something, make sure to do it with excellence.
— Adina Rishe Gewirtz, Zebra Forest
The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known.
— Raheel Farooq
Learn, or you'll be made to learn.
— Raheel Farooq
The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning
In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.
— Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
We attract what we're meant to because we're aware & self-empowered enough to choose most of the time. Other times we have lessons to learn
— Jay Woodman
Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.
— Barry López, About This Life
When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.
— Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.
— Jack Kerouac, Satori In Paris
One day," she told us, "you'll have to leave here and go out into the big world out there and earn your living like everyone else. To do that you need to learn. The more you learn now, the more interesting your life will be.
— Michael Morpurgo, Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you’ll learn all about when you’re older and don’t care anymore.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While
In order to benefit fully from the education provided in the Theocratic Ministry School, you, the student, must make a personal effort.
— Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Benefit From Theocratic Ministry School Education
That's your opportunity--to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.
— Seth Godin, Poke the Box
Odd how we focus on studying wars at at school to form our 'education'. No wonder we know so little about making and forging peace as adults.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
Education is that process by which thought is opened out of the soul, and, associated with outward . . . things, is reflected back upon itself, and thus made conscious of its reality and shape. It is Self-Realization. As a means, therefore, of educating the soul out of itself, and mirroring forth its ideas, the external world offers the materials. This is the dim glass in which the senses are first called to display the soul, until, aided by the keener state of imagination . . . it separates those outward types of itself from their sensual connection, in its own bright mirror recognizes again itself, as a distinctive object in space and time, but out of it in existence, and painting itself upon these, as emblems of its inner and super-sensual life which no outward thing can fully portray. . . . A language is to be instituted between [the child’s] spirit and the surrounding scene of things in which he dwells. . . . He who is seeking to know himself, should be ever seeking himself in external things, and by so doing will he be best able to find, and explore his inmost light.
— Amos Bronson Alcott
I was still learning when I taught my last class.
— Claude Moore Fuess
Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
In what areas are you learning and growing? If the answer is none that means you're stagnating or regressing. Learn more, earn more, know more, grow more!
— Rob Liano
We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, “Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose.” School—from pre-K to postdoc programs—exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues.
— Marc Aronson
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
We don't really know anything. Those who accept this are more likely to learn something.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.
— Orson Scott Card, Treason
Dwelling much on the contemplation of little things, [we] are in danger of losing the intellectual appetite.
— L.H. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies
Most importantly, I'd learned how to question and why ("when" had never been an issue: always).
— Leslie Anthony, Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist
They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.
— Ally Condie, Reached
How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word? 'Why is this so?' I demanded to know.
— Theresa Breslin, The Medici Seal
No one answered. You could hear the light buzzing over us. I love that sound. It means school isn't working, that the teachers are losing the battle.
— Adam Rapp, The Children and the Wolves
Learn good things from professionals but do not change like professional,it doesn't mean on what position they are..
— Raghava
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
— Alain de Botton
The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.
— Alexandra K.Trenfor
The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It's work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.
— Noam Chomsky
The thing about traveling alone, is that you run into your insecurities and fears times ten the normal! You run into all the good things and all the bad things about yourself on a daily basis, and are allowed the opportunity to truly become your own friend. Traveling alone is a learning process; some people travel for leisure, I travel to run into myself!
— C. JoyBell C.
I learned a world from each / one whom I loved
— Allen Ginsberg
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.
— John Dewey, Experience and Education
The years teach us much, which the days never knew.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.
— Noam Chomsky
A prudent man will always try to follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been truly outstanding, so that, if he is not quite as skillful as they, at least some of their ability may rub off on him.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There will be danger; some of you may not live to complete your lessons. It's a risk you take. This world is bigger than you and it will go on, regardless.
— Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch
I will learn by screwing up.
— Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three
Perseverance is everything. We all stumbled when we took our first steps yet we were running sooner than we realized, and then we couldn’t stay still. Why stay still now?
— Rob Liano
[John] Kobak explained, 'The way you learn anything is that something fails, and you figure out how not to have it fail again.
— Robert S. Arrighi, Pursuit of Power: NASA's Propulsion Systems Laboratory No. 1 and 2
Among the many short cuts to science, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning with difficulty.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
I don't know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn't tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you.
— Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
You see, unlearning is a very important process towards becoming enlightened, because in this life you will have learned wrong ways and those wrong ways that you have learned are barriers blocking you from becoming who you really are, therefore it is vital that they are unlearned.
— Andrew James Pritchard, Smoke and Mirrors
Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
— Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
To turn the tide of materialism in the Christian community, we desperately need bold models of kingdom-centered living. Despite our need to do it in a way that doesn't glorify people, we must hear each other's stories about giving or else our people will not learn to give.
— Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions and Eternity
I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.
— Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing ore than to challenge herself with more complex parts--and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature....Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it.
— J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe
we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.
— Orson Scott Card, The Lost Gate
If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.
— Randy Alcorn, Money, Possessions and Eternity
By all means, learn beyond the classroom. In the end, thats all that will matter
— Gossy Ukanwoke
If there's nothing to learn because we know it all, what's the challenge? Why would the effort matter? What would be the point? - Odd Thomas
— Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
The capacity to learn is a gift
—  The ability to learn is a skill
Suffering is one of life's great teachers.
— Bryant McGill
Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane," he [Ed Ricketts] said. "And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this," Ed said. "Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.
— John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
If people are not making mistakes, they are not trying new things. If they are making the same mistake twice, they are not learning new things!
— Walter C. Wright, Relational Leadership: A Biblical Model for Leadership Service
School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.
— James Lee Burke
...the difference between me and her is that she loves being smart, and I love learning, and those are two very different things.
— Brynna Gabrielson, Starkissed
The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.
— William Glasser
Dear God," said Nudge under her breath, "I want real parents. But I want them to want me too. I wantthem to love me. I already love them. Please see what you can do. Thanks very much. Love, Nudge."Okay, so I'm not saying we were pros at this or anything. (Max thoughts)
— James Patterson, The Angel Experiment
Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it?  That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar; Self-Reliance. Compensation
But one of the things I have learned during the time I have spent in the United States is an old African American saying: Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference.
— Marcus Samuelsson, Yes, Chef
I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.
— John Buchan, Castle Gay
I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
When all the teachers are gone, who will be your teacher?The student replied: “Everything!Kobun, paused, then said: “No, you".
— Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi
When we unnecessarily elongate the process of "learning to read," we postpone "reading to learn" - learning itself - by years.
— Mike Schmoker, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
I remember loving pencils. I was fond of paper. I loved the small of textbooks. I loved the way the light from a desk lamp was bright on a page. I loved the smell of fresh-cut grass. It was a thing everybody loved, but there was no shame in being that much like everybody else, in sharing that.
— Frederick Barthelme, Elroy Nights
The beginning [of a journey] is a terrible time to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance. In self-directed education, a lot of the value comes from exploiting opportunities that arise well out to sea, once I've seen some things and begun the learning process.
— James Marcus Bach, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success
To truly learn from someone or something, one must first learn to love them.
— Silvia Hartmann
worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).
— Mike Schmoker, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
Learning is the first quality of acceptance and vice versa
— Raghava.k
Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.
— Bryant McGill
It was OK to need people
—  she was learning that. You just had to be careful.
This was the book I read over and over. I really felt so in tune with them- I knew all the dates of their lives, what they had been doing, whre they had been. They were always my heroes, creating something fantastic against all odds, and against their real life.
— Christian Tetzlaff
Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.
— James Madison
A learned man who doesn’t restrain his passions is like a blind man holding a torch, he guides others but not himself.
— Shaykh Sa di
Education is the process of turning cocksure ignorance into thoughtful uncertainty.
— K. G. Johnson
What I learned on my own I still remember
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.
— Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until you’re all grown up. I’m going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don’t open it.
— Philip Pullman
...You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
I'll show you how," Peter said. "Stop hiding behind your ignorance.
— Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways
One cannot learn from someone whom one distrusts.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.
— Raymond Carver, Cathedral
No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
If everything is done for me... how will I ever learn?
— John Flanagan, The Emperor of Nihon-Ja
To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.
— Lori McWilliam Pickert
Life is a test.  It was designed to be so.  It is where we taste the bitter and the sweet; where we feel pain and pleasure; where we learn right from wrong; where we pass through both darkness and light.  It is a time to make choices.  And through this process we form our characters—some grand and glorious, some barely decent, and others just plain monstrous. 
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
We need mystery. Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever.”The quote of a grandmother explaining The Great Mystery of the universe to her grandson.
— Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse
Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work.
— Lori McWilliam Pickert
Everything I do is kind of a lesson, even if I am the only person who learns it.
— Taylor Mali
As you have seen the treachery of love because of me, I have seen my cruelty because of you. But you learned mercy from me, and from you I learned resilience. As you came to understand me enough to know the value I placed on selfless love, I understand your nature better.
— D. Morgenstern
Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices!...
— Carlo Collodi
Learning, without any opportunities to share what we've learned, is a little like cooking for ourselves; we do it, but we probably won't do it as well.
— Mike Schmoker, Results
He switched off the light, came back and sat in the chair. In the darkness, Liesel kept her eyes open. She was watching the words.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The Sufis are unanimous that a Guide (Sheikh) is absolutely essential, though never available on demand: 'the Sufis are not merchants'.
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
If the path has been laid down, why the successive appearance of different teachers? Why would anyone reinvent the wheel, if everything were as cosy and sequential as primitive longing so easily convinces us?
— Idries Shah, Sufi Thought and Action
Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an “educator,” because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience.
— Siva Vaidhyanathan
I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.
— Peter Ferry, Travel Writing
Collaboration allows teachers to capture each other's fund of collective intelligence.
— Mike Schmoker, Results
The number of books students read...is among the best indicators of student reading development.
— Mike Schmoker, Results
If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you can't learn any other way.--Mark Twain
— Tony-Paul de Vissage
History can teach us so much, and yet we seem to learns so little.
— Orrin Woodward
Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn’t be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance.
— Deborah Feldman
Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
— Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?
— E.R. Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love
There are some things you can’t learn at any university, except for one, the University of Life... the only college where everyone is a permanent student.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
I should learn to run, to wrestle, to swim, to ride horses, to row, to drive a car, to fire a rifle. I should fill my soul with flesh. I should fill my flesh with soul. In fact, I should reconcile at last within me the two internal antagonists.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
You learn more from getting your butt kicked than getting it kissed.
— Tom Hanks
Allowing children to learn about what interests them is good, but helping them do it in a meaningful, rigorous way is better. Freedom and choice are good, but a life steeped in thinking, learning, and doing is better. It’s not enough to say, “Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them how to accomplish the things they want to do. We need to prepare them to make the life they want.
— Lori McWilliam Pickert
The most important thing I learned is that to be truly happy, you've got to pay attention to that stupid inner voice we all have. It knows what you need and will drive you shit crazy until you listen to it.
— Dorothea Benton Frank, Isle of Palms
I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.
— Edmund Wilson
Right it is to be taught even by the enemy.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.
— George Santayana
When our hopes for performance are not completely met, realistic optimism involves accepting what cannot now be changed, rather than condemning or second-guessing ourselves. Focusing on the successful aspects of performance (even when the success is modest) promotes positive affect, reduces self-doubt, and helps to maintain motivation (e.g., McFarland & Ross, 1982).... Nevertheless, realistic optimism does not include or imply expectations that things will improve on their own. Wishful thinking of this sort typically has no reliable supporting evidence. Instead, the opportunity-seeking component of realistic optimism motivates efforts to improve future performances on the basis of what has been learned from past performances.
— Sandra L. Schneider
A big secret to life is when you learn that learning is just as entertaining as entertainment, but with long term benefits.
— Orrin Woodward
I miss being a student," said Abdul Wahid. "I miss the passionate discussions with my friends, and most of all the hours among the books.
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
The philosophy of project-based homeschooling — this particular approach to helping children become strong thinkers, learners, and doers — is dependent upon the interest and the enthusiastic participation and leadership of the learners themselves, the children.
— Lori McWilliam Pickert
Not many are the moments in life, where the easiest choice also happens to be the best one.Cherish and remember those moments, but do not let them become a habit, for the fruits that hard work reaps are irreplaceable.
— Rosen Topuzov
Do not give hope where there is none.Do not turn away hope where there is seldom some.
— Rosen Topuzov
I think it is the duty of all human beings, as intelligent and communicative beings, to learn all the ideas thought up before ours and use them as a means to think up new ones.
— Jonathan Culver
We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.
— Irene Tomkinson, Not Like My Mother: Becoming a Sane Parent After Growing Up in a Crazy Family
If what we learn is no more than what we expect to learn, then we have learned nothing at all.
— John H. Lienhard, The Engines of Our Ingenuity: An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture
Time is money, but money isn't time
— Rosen Topuzov
Love forever, love is free
— Rosen Topuzov
You have to be silent, but ready
— Rosen Topuzov
Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Stepping into Freedom: Rules of Monastic Practice for Novices
I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process. It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.
— Osho
if the ocean can calm itself, so can you.we are both salt water mixed with air.
— Nayyirah Waheed
The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
— Philip K. Dick
Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable, you are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal. Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself…Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all. You don’t know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem— then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what others say about you— it is irrelevant!When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.
— Osho
There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.
— Kate DiCamillo, Despereaux = Tale of Despereaux
You exist in time, but you belong to eternity- You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time-You are deathless, living in a body of death- Your consciousness knows no death, no birth- It is only your body that is born and dies-But you are not aware of your consciousness-You are not conscious of your consciousness-And that is the whole art of meditation;Becoming conscious of consciousness itself.
— Osho
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
— George MacDonald, Wilfrid Cumbermede
Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so'. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?
— Ramana Maharshi
Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.
— Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
The singing Sun the signing moon the singing stars and the singing galaxies are the direct expression of the divine word AUM.
— Amit Ray, Om Chanting & Meditation
The Way to do is to be.
— Lao Tzu
Keep your heart clearAnd transparent,And you willNever be bound.A single disturbed thoughtCreates ten thousand distractions.
— Ryōkan
Meditate, Visualize and Create your own reality and the universe will simply reflect back to you.
— Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
Yoga is not just repetation of few postures - it is more about the exploration and discovery of the subtle energies of life.
— Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
Meditation is the process of transformation and beautification of soul from a leaf-eating caterpillar to a nectar-sipping butterfly. It grows with the wings of love and compassion.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
There are two types of empathy: the positive empathy and the negative empathy. When we are fully carried away by the unaware activities of the mirror neurons, we are under the trap of negative empathy. The negative empathy generates attachments. Out of these attachments suffering follows. Negative empathy is a kind of reaction to a situation, whereas positive empathy is internal response of peace love and tranquility.... In positive empathy, your deep tranquility, joy and peace activates the mirror neurons of the others, whereas in negative empathy your mirror neurons are activated by the disturbance of others.
— Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
The act of meditation is being spacious.
— Sogyal Rinpoche
Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the Divine inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
Meditation is a journey to know yourself. Knowing yourself has many layers. Start knowing your bodily discomforts. Know your success, know your failures. Know your fears. Know your irritations. Know your pleasures, joy and happiness. Know your mental wounds. Go deeper and examine every feeling you have.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
Through systematic meditation one can awaken the third eye and touch the cosmic awareness. Sushumna nadi is the subtle pathway in the spinal cord which passes through the main psychic centers. The awakening of these centers means a gradual expansion of awareness, until it reaches the cosmic awareness. Each center has its own beauty and gracefulness. Through generations of ignorance and unconsciousness, this channel of awareness becomes obscured and hidden. Meditation is to become aware about this internal life energy. Meditation is the procedure to rearrange, harmonize, activate, and integrate the individual life energy with the cosmic life energy.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life. The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.
— Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.
— Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Respond
—  don't react.Listen
Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.
— Tamora Pierce, Sandry's Book
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.
— Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love
A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . . If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Meditation is blossoming of the prefrontal cortex to overcome the momentum of the nature. It is coming out of the loops of memories, patterns,fears, dreams and anger.
— Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
I meditate, and when I do, Prince Harry appears in my subconscious and meditates with me. It's a little strange but I don't think there's anything I can do about it. Sometimes he's not the only one; the other day it was me, Prince Harry, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Coco the gorilla, and George Clooney. We were all floating above the earth looking down at the continents as they passed. George Clooney suggested I visit Providence, Rhode Island. The Dalai Lama sighed deeply and said he'd like to visit Tibet.Poor Dalai Lama.
— Kristin Cashore
Watchfulness is the path of immortality:Unwatchfulness is the path of death.Those who are watchful never die:Those who do not watch are already as dead.Those who with a clear mind have seen this truth,Those who are wise and ever watchful,They feel the joy of watchfulness,The joy of the path of the great.And those who in high thought and in deep contemplationWith ever living power advance on the path,They in the end reach NIRVANA,The peace supreme and infinite joy.~ Buddha
— Juan Mascaró, The Dhammapada
Include and grow. Include and expand.
— Osho
People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.
— Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
When even one virtue becomes our nature, the mind becomes clean and tranquil. Then there is no need to practice meditation; we will automatically be meditating always. (151)
— Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.
— Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet.It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there -buried under the 50,000 thoughtsthe average person thinks every day
— Deepak Chopra
Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
— Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
Look within, There is no difference between yourself, Self and Guru. You are always Free. There is no teacher, there is no student, there is no teaching.
— H.W.L. Poonja
The practice of forgiveness is very much like the practice of meditation. You have to do it often and persist at it in order to be any good.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer