We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
For there is a great difference in delivery of the mathematics , which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy , which is the most immersed. And howsoever contention hath been moved , touching a uniformity of method in multiformity of matter, yet we see how that opinion, besides the weakness of it, hath been of ill desert towards learning, as that which taketh the way to reduce learning to certain empty and barren generalities; being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method.
The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.
The Creative knows the great beginnings. The Receptive completes the finished things. The Creative is decided and therefore shows to men the easy. The Receptive is yielding and therefore shows to men the simple. Learning is movement from moment to moment.
I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.
The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always list'ning to himself appears. All books he reads, and all he reads assails.