Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

We need wisdom the most when we believe in it the least.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It's about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.

I don't care how smart a kid you are. The only way you learn what's not right is from experience.

I know that we shall meet problems along the way, but I'd far rather see for myself what's going on in the world outside, than rely on newspapers, television, politicians and religious leaders to tell me what I should be thinking.

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.

Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.

Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

My parents encouraged thought. You'll get through life better if you learn how to think.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Doubt everything. Find your own light.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

All through my life, when faced with a difficult decision, I always ask myself - where can I learn more. Make the choice to learn.