| Copyright 2006 Julie Shepherd Knapp |
| about the book |
| The Homeschool Diner's Deep Thoughts for Homeschoolers A Collection of Quotations Relevant to Homeschoolers and Other Life-Long Learners by Julie Shepherd Knapp, copyright 2005, 2006, 2007 (compiled from various sources) "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come." -- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885) "Freedom of teaching and of opinion in book or press is the foundation for the sound and natural development of any people." ~~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed; it's the only thing that ever has.” -- Margaret Mead "If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us." ~~ Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965) ' "The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you." ~~ B.B. King (1925 - ) "You learn something every day if you pay attention." ~~ Ray LeBlond "To teach is to learn twice." ~~ Joseph Joubert (1754 - 1824) "Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What's a sun dial in the shade?" ~~ Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) "Often we.....expect the child to follow the pressure from the so called real world, even when we know it is not a good fit. Actually, there is no such thing as the real world. We each have the power and the will to do what we need to do. Children who grow up with a strong Self will understand they can create their own niche in the world." -- Annemarie Roeper "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." ~~ Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) "Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." -- Robert Frost "All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary." ~~ Sally Ride, American astronaut "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." ~~ Will Durant (1885 - 1981) "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience -- well, that comes from poor judgement." ~~ Cousin Woodman "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." -- Voltaire "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." -- General George S. Patton Jr. "No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back." -- John Holt "You cannot teach anybody anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves." ~~ Galileo (1564 - 1642) "Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating." -- Anonymous "Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand… what he learns and the way he understands it." Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) "...since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned." -- John Holt "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion." -- Allan Bloom "Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." --John Gardner "One striking fact is that the complex world of education—unlike defense, health care, or industrial production—does not rest on a strong research base. In no other field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on the make policy choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used." -- "Improving Student Learning", National Research Council (1999) "To control and sort young people for the sake of institutional efficiency is to crush the human spirit." ~~ Ron Miller ""Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds." ~~ Plato (427 BC – 347 BC) "If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn." -- Ignacio Estrada "Children need models rather than critics." ~~ Joseph Joubert (1754 - 1824) "Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers" - Socrates (420 BC) [editor's note: "some things never change" ;-)] "Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it." -- Madeleine L'Engle "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." -- H.H. Williams "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking." --Jerry Seinfeld "Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way." -- Samuel Butler "Imagination is more important than knowledge." ~~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) "The erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -- H.L. Mencken "What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all." -- John Holt "It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think." ~~ Robert Hutchins (1899 - 1977) "Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom." -- John Stuart Mill "Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character." ~~ Hosea Ballou (1771 - 1852) "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant." ~~ Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) "A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle." ~~ Erin Majors "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." ~~ Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) "Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand… what he learns and the way he understands it." ~~ Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) "My heart is singing for joy this morning. A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed." ~~ Anne Sullivan (1866 – 1936) "The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn." ~~ John Lubbock (1834 - 1913) "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated." ~~ Alec Bourne "We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people." --Arthur Schopenhauer "What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." -- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1891) "Few ideas have more 'revolutionary' implications than computer-supported self-directed learning. (Remember that a previous technological innovation, the printing press, was the sine qua non for all the democratic revolutions of the 18th Century!)" -- Peter Shepherd "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." ~~ Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC) "The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration." -- Allan Bloom (1930 - 1992) "Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." ~~ W. B. Yeats (1865 - 1939) "All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent." ~~ John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963) "It's not what is poured into a student, but what is planted." ~~ Linda Conway "You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives." ~~ Clay P. Bedford "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." ~~ Gandhi (1869 - 1948) "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." ~~ Goethe (1749 - 1832) Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Be in charge of your own destiny, or some one else will." ~~ Jack Welch (1935 - ) "The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running." ~~ Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) "Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere." -- Chinese Proverb "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." ~~ Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) "Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence." ~~ Unknown "The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." ~~ Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899 - 1977) "Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life." ~~ David M. Burns "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. " -- Albert Einstein "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." ~~ John Dewey (1859 - 1952) "Does thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of." ~~ Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790) "It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers -- they help us to learn." ~~ John Bradshaw (1933 - ) "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." ~~ John Powell (1834 - 1902) "Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind." ~~ Marva Collins "If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people." ~~ Chinese proverb "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." ~~ Doris Lessing (1919 – ) "What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers." ~~ Martina Horner "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." ~~ Aristotle (384 BC – 322) "People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong." ~~ Bill Vaughan (1915 - 1977) "We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 -- and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?" -- Arthur C. Clark (1917 - ) "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it." -- Alexandre Dumas "Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy." ~~ Leo Buscaglia (1924 - 1998) Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development." -- Emily Blackwell "The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness." --Jerome S. Bruner "Civilization is the encouragement of differences. Civilization thus becomes a synonym of democracy. Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, is both uncivilized and undemocratic." -- Mahatma Gandhi "Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. " -- Sir William Haley "What we learn to do, we learn by doing." ~~ Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) "Let the parent ask "Why?" and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him - and he will remember it - the reason why." -- Charlotte Mason (1935) "To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains." ~~ Mary Pettibone Poole "The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain." ~~ Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965) "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence." ~~ Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) "A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions." ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894) "When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing." ~~ Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." ~~ Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) "Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." ~~ Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) "We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open." ~~ Harry Edwards (1893 - 1976) "The secret of education is respecting the pupil." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson "Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person." ~~ David M. Burns| "If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." ~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) "Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." ~~ Scott Adams "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. " ~~ Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." ~~ Nelson Mandela (1918 - ) "Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army." ~~ Edward Everett (1794 - 1865) "Nothing is more powerful and liberating than knowledge." ~~ William H. Gray III (1941 - ) "Knowledge is power." ~~ Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." ~~ Anatole France (1844 - 1924) "Only the educated are free." ~~ Epictetus (55 - 135) "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." ~~ Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977) "It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can." ~~ Jane Hamilton (1957 – ) "Education is the best provision for old age." ~~ Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) "I am still learning." ~~ Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) "Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational." -- Charles Schulz "Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." ~~ Claus Moser (1922 - ) "It is a shame that ignorance isn't painful... " --unknown "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education." ~~ Charlotte Bronte (1816 - 1855) "Good schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity." ~~ Deborah Meier (1931- ) "It is the responsibility of every adult to make sure that children hear what we have learned from the lessons of life and to hear over and over that we love them." ~~ Marian W. Edelman (1939 - ) "Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child." -- Plato "You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him." -- unknown "If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness." ~~ Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987) "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." ~~ George Santayana (1863 - 1952) "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." ~~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." ~~ Henry B. Adams (1838 - 1918) "They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel." ~~ Carl W. Buechner "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative _expression and knowledge." ~~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) "A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him." ~~ James Baldwin (1924-1987) "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us." ~~ Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) "Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher." -- Buddha "A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars." ~~ Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) "A gifted teacher is as rare as a gifted doctor, and makes far less money." ~~ Author unknown "Who shall kindle others must himself glow." ~~ Italian Proverb "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~~ William Arthur Ward (1921 - 1994) "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." ~~ Thomas Carruthers (1840-1924) "Sooner or later we all quote our mothers." ~~ Bern Williams "If we did all the things that we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." ~~ Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931) "Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil." ~~ C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) "...I think we owe it to children to let them dig their knowledge, of whatever subject, for themselves out of the "fit" book; and this for two reasons: What a child digs for is his own possession; what is poured into his ear, like the idle song of a pleasant singer, floats out as lightly as it came in, and is rarely assimilated. I do not mean to say that the lecture and the oral lesson are without their uses; but these uses are, to give impulse and to order knowledge; and not to convey knowledge..." -- Charlotte Mason "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas." -- Agatha Christie "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." ~~ Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967) "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. " -- E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster (1879–1970) Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." -- Winston Churchill "The true university of these days is a collection of books." -- attributed to Thomas Carlyle “(1795–1881) "The wisest mind has something yet to learn." ~~ George Santayana (1863 - 1952) "The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is. " -- Allan Bloom (1930–1992) "You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." -- C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. "-- Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." ~~ Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968) "Once you have deliberated and determined that a course of action is wise, never discredit your judgment. Stand squarely behind your decision. Chances are there may indeed be people who misunderstand your intentions and who may even condemn you. But, if according to your best judgment, you are acting rightly, you have nothing to fear. Take a stand. Don't be cravenly noncommittal." -- Epictetus (from "The Art of Living") "If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed." ~~ Chinese Proverb "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) "Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around." ~~ Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) "Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." -- Carl Bard |
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