Quotes about Learning

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing—and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: "Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and the earnest will find it.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling