Henry Adams Quotes

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

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.

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?

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Schools teach the need to be taught.

All education must be self-education.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

Learning is not to be tacked to the mind, but we must fuse and blend them together, not merely giving the mind a slight tincture, but a thorough and perfect dye. And if we perceive no evident change and improvement, it would be better to leave it alone; learning is a dangerous weapon, and apt to wound its master if it be wielded by a feeble hand, and by one not well acquainted with its use.

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

As my father [Javāharlāl Nehrū] said, you have to keep an open mind, but you have to pour something into it - otherwise ideas slip away like sand between your fingers.

Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind.

To be getting an education means this: to be learning what is your own, and what is not your own.

Reading is more important than writing.

Education forms the common mind.

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.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

The first indication of a young person's growing smarter is that he no longer understands the things which he used to consider quite intelligible and self-evident.

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. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know