John Stuart Mill Quotes

Education forms the common mind.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

It is only through reading that one can understand how people are smarter than you and what they have left behind for you.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.

The trained mind is a rich mind.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.

To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam. Instruction enlarges the natural powers of the mind.

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary.

When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.

Every head should be cultivated.

The education is the answer to everything, really, and on so many different levels. The minutiae of life require analytical skills that you learn in being educated, an ability to navigate the very systems that constitute life. They all require some degree of education, and if you don't get it, you're at a real disadvantage.

Defects and weakness in men's understandings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds; I am apt to think, the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.