Learning anything requires commitment and the ability to push through the uncomfortable feeling of not being very good until reaching competency. While on the path to competency, a little motivation can go a long way. Below are 35 quotes about learning to inspire you on your learning journey.
“Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.”
— William Crawford
“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
— Herbert Spencer
“If you think education is expensive, try estimating the cost of ignorance.”
— Howard Gardner
“Education without application is just entertainment.”
— Tim Sanders
“I am still learning.”
— Michelangelo
“Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key.”
— Tom Colicchio
“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
— Mark Twain
“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“The doer alone learneth.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”
— African Proverb
“A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.”
— Eric Hoffer
"Action comes about if and only if we find a discrepancy between what we are experiencing and what we want to experience."
—Philip J. Runkel
“Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire.”
— W.B. Yeats
“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”
— Thomas Carruthers
"I realized that becoming a master of karate was not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times."
— Chet Holmes
"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."
— Voltaire
"Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first."
— Ray Congdon
"The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety."
— Josh Waitzkin
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
― Leo Buscaglia
“Learning never exhausts the mind.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle
“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
― Abigail Adams
“The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.”
― B.B. King
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― E.M. Forster
“I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. “
— Abraham Lincoln
“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.”
— Chinese Proverb
“Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will.”
— Vernon Howard
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
— Henry Ford
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
— Carl Rogers
"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
— Oliver Wendell Holmes