Louis Agassiz Quotes

A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

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

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.

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

As between mileage and experience choose experience.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

Experience by itself teaches nothing.

Knowing isn't doing; doing isn't knowing. Nothing but the knowing and the doing gets it done.

A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study.

Education without execution is extinction

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

Sometimes experience trumps assumption.

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently...

To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.

Precise knowledge is the only true knowledge, and he who does not teach exactly, does not teach at all.

Knowledge must come through action.

A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many.

A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

Education is cheap; experience is expensive.

Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.