A man who has given his heart to learning and true wisdom and exercised that part of himself is surely bound, if he attains to truth, to have immortal and divine thoughts, and cannot fail to achieve immortality as full as is permitted to human nature; and because he has always looked after divine element in himself and kept his guardian spirit in good order he must be happy above all men.
learningquotes
Once you stop learning, you start dying.
Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says thank you.
There you have Socrates’ wisdom; he himself isn’t willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn’t even grateful to them.
You can apply yourself voluntarily to reading and learning, but you cannot really apply yourself to thinking: thinking have to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one.
Conjecture or hypothesis must come before observation or perception: we have inborn expectations; we have latent inborn knowledge, in the form of latent expectations, to be activated by a stimuli to which we react as a rule while engaged in active exploration. All learning is a modification (it may be a refutation) of some prior knowledge and thus, in the last analysis, of some inborn knowledge.
The method of learning by trial and error — of learning from our mistakes — seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practiced by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
