Quotes about Learning
We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.
— Henry David Thoreau
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
— Henry David Thoreau
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
— Henry David Thoreau
As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life. It is never isolated, or simply added as treasure to our stock. When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.
— Henry David Thoreau
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless beside being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, he who knows nothing about a subject, and what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, — or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
— Henry David Thoreau
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
— Henry David Thoreau
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.
— Henry David Thoreau
I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.
— Henry David Thoreau
An artist is first an amateur.
— Henry David Thoreau
I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
— Henry David Thoreau
Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.
— Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
— Henry David Thoreau