Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ’em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.
Before you conquer the mountain, you must learn to overcome your fear.
All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It’s not on the curriculum.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.[Beginnende Bildung fängt immer mit dem Tadel an, vollendete aber sieht in jedem das Positive.]
Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
Often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple but, rather, against other learned men.
Learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
But really, the term “forgive and forget” doesn’t make sense to me. Forgiving does allow us to stop dwelling on an issue, which isn’t always healthy. But if we forget, we don’t learn from our mistakes. And that can be deadly.
You’ll learn it all soon enough… You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven’t…You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven’t walked at all.
