Outstanding performance is one of the keys to success that I discuss in Straight Talk for Success. If you want to become an outstanding performer, you need to do three things. 1) Stay on top of your game by becoming a lifelong learner. 2) Set high goals and do whatever it takes to achieve them. 3) Get organized. Manage your time, life and stress well.
The other day, I came across a treasure trove of quotes on learning – most of which apply to lifelong learning. I don’t usually do quote posts, but I thought I’d try something different today. Please let me know if you would like me to do quote posts on the other success topics I discuss on this blog.
Quotes on the Importance of Lifelong Learning
You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford
Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. ~Henry L. Doherty
I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. ~Eartha Kitt
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. ~Attributed to Harry S. Truman
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study. ~Chinese Proverb
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. ~Jacob BronowskiEducation consists mainly of what we have unlearned. ~Mark Twain
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
You learn something every day if you pay attention. ~Ray LeBlond
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. ~Antisthenes
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. ~Alexander Pope
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. ~Thomas Huxley
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928
I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. ~Abraham Lincoln
The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. ~Mohammed
Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. ~Chinese Proverb
All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. ~Martin H. Fischer
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. ~Winston Churchill
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live. ~Mortimer Adler
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. ~Willa Cather
There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I am defeated, and know it, if I meet any human being from whom I find myself unable to learn anything. ~George Herbert Palmer
Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. ~Vernon Howard
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I find four great classes of students: The dumb who stay dumb. The dumb who become wise. The wise who go dumb. The wise who remain wise. ~Martin H. Fischer
No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world. ~Frances Willard
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. ~Henry Ford
It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong. ~Martin H. Fischer
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time. ~Russell Hoban
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. ~H.G. Wells
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. ~Dudley Field Malone
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. ~Thomas Szasz
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets. ~Bernard Keble Sandwell
Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later. ~Dana Stewart Scott
His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken. ~H.G. Wells
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ~Alvin Toffler
Learning without thought is labor lost. ~Confucius
The pupil can only educate himself. Teachers are the custodians of apparatus upon which he himself must turn and twist to acquire the excellencies that distinguish the better from the poorer of God's vessels. ~Martin H. Fischer
The best of my education has come from the public library… my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. ~Lesley Conger
The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. ~Henry S. Haskins
We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself. ~Lloyd Alexander
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. ~Marvin Minsky
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. ~John Lubbock
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back. ~Chinese Proverb
People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong. ~Bill Vaughan
The common sense point here is simple. Successful people are outstanding performers. Outstanding performers stay on top of their game. They are lifelong learners, committed to learning everything they can about their profession, their business, their company, their company’s competitors and life in general. It's simple, really — if you want to succeed, you have to keep learning. As the Chinese proverb says, if you quit learning, you are not standing still, you are losing ground.
I hope you have enjoyed these quotes on the importance of lifelong learning. Please leave a comment sharing which ones resonated with you and why. Also, please let me know if you enjoy this type of post. If you do, I’ll add it to my repertoire. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
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