To shun an elder's word is to refuse advice.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

A leader who does not take advice is not a leader.

Do not feel certain of anything.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

Public education has not produced an educated public.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man’s own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

There are few things more pathetic than those who have lost their curiosity and sense of adventure, and who no longer care to learn.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

I've learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind.

If you want a new idea, read an old book.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it continues the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.