Life And Learning Quotes

In large part, we are teachers precisely because we remember what it was like to be a student. Someone inspired us. Someone influenced us. Or someone hurt us. And we've channeled that joy (or pain) into our own unique philosophies on life and learning and we're always looking for an opportunity to share them - with each other, our students, parents, or in our communities. ~ Tucker Elliot

The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of Shakespeare's work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neurotic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as well as being a hero, and a perfect Renaissance prince. These judgements serve perhaps only to show how many interpretations of one character may be put forward. 'To be or not to be' is the centre of Hamlet's questioning. Reasons not to go on living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on living, until he completes his revenge for his father's murder, and becomes 'most royal', the true 'Prince of Denmark' (which is the play's subtitle), in many ways the perfection of Renaissance man.
Hamlet's progress is a 'struggle of becoming' - of coming to terms with life, and learning to accept it, with all its drawbacks and challenges. He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in a series of seven soliloquies - of which 'To be or not to be' is the fourth and central one. These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to complete awareness and acceptance (as he says, 'the readiness is all'), give a structure to the play, making the progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die. ~ Ronald Carter

As an individual passes from one situation to another, his [sic] world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he has learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue. Otherwise the course of experience is disorderly, since the individual factor that enters into making an experience is split. A divided world, a world whose parts and aspects do not hang together, is at once a sign and a cause of a divided personality. When the splitting-up reaches a certain point we call the person insane. A fully integrated personality, on the other hand, exists only when successive experiences are integrated with one another. It can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed. ~ John Dewey

The journey that I have undertaken, meeting people from all walks of life and learning from them, has been my biggest achievement. ~ Aamir Khan

In life we don't always get what we want; hopes and dreams get washed away so easily, hearts are broken, chances are missed, and we always seem to end up right back where we started. ~ Rebecah McManus

The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill? ~ John Ensign

All of us have a story like that one - some of us more than one. It's part of life and learning. Why, if babies stopped trying to walk the first time they fell down, the whole world would be full of people who crawled. ~ Debbie Viguie

Life is not only about going after name, money, success, fame and fortune and getting all of them. It is also about how you live with humility, dignity, and discipline when all of what you attained and acquired are taken away from you. Resilience and equanimity cannot be developed and deployed in simulated environments. They are always discovered within you, when you stand in the middle of the battle of Life, in the chaos, in the eye of the storm. It is by facing Life and learning to be happy, to be useful, despite your circumstances, that you become stronger. ~ AVIS Viswanathan

My faith, I mean, that's such a personal aspect that a lot of times, of course it's going to come out through the song. But at the same time, I'm not a religious salesman. I feel like God doesn't really need a salesman, and what these songs are are simply my interactions with this life and learning. I guess the bottom line is the songs are really honest, you know what I mean. That faith is going to come through. If the listener is looking for it, that's definitely a part of it. ~ Jon Foreman

I also believe that the boundaries of school need to be made more porous and permeable, that we need to reduce the generational segregation that defines life and learning in our society. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

So many years of being lonely and discounted, no one ever truly seeing me, the person that I really am. The Gabriella I so desperately wanted to be. Yet somehow he broke through the walls and barriers and penetrated my frail, dejected heart. He loves me for all that I am and what I will become, even though it scares us both to death. He accepts the darkest parts of me and doesn't try to change me, in all my shattered complexity. Meeting him has given this facade of my life new meaning. He's given me purpose, strength. He's given me love. Dorian has given me everything and, in turn, is everything to me. Designed by the Divine Power especially for me. ~ S.L. Jennings

Forgiveness is divine. It purifies your heart and mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you. ~ Patrick Ness

I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing - - how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck - only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. Now, you begin to get scared. You don't believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can't hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative i ~ Sylvia Plath

My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits - the relevant fruits - are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

There are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen. ~ James Hilton

None would remember you for how many years you lived and what you did to your life. Instead, they will remember you for how the realization of your idea contributed to humanity and made a difference to the lives of others. ~ Prem Jagyasi

Nothing in any religious teachings goes beyond Humanism, unless you add the supernatural...Make believe is the only difference between being human and being religious. ~ Travis Culliton

We've been conditioned to believe that things always have a way of working themselves out and that happily ever after is within our reach, if we just work hard enough. The truth is that none of us are immune to tragedy. No matter how hard you work, no matter how good you are, life isn't obligated to give you a fairy-tale ending. ~ Anonymous

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It's been protected by the efficient armour, it's never participated in life, it's never been exposed to living and to managing the person's affairs, it's never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it's never properly lived. That's how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced...

And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn't come out of that creature isn't worth having, or it's worth having only as a tool - for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful...

And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line - unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round ~ Ted Hughes

Into this life of cruel wonder sent,
Without a word to tell us what it meant,
Sent back again without a reason why -
Birth, life, and death - 'twas all astonishment. ~ Richard Le Gallienne

Adventuresome stories to life for kids big and small who dare to dream. ~ Jack Makhlouf

And he'd do nothing for ten minutes but look at the lock, and then he'd select a piece of bent metal from a ring of several hundred almost identical pieces, and under an hour later he'd be walking away with a neat ten percent of the takings. Of course, you didn't have to use Mr. Brown's services. You could always opt to spend the rest of your life looking at a locked door ~ Terry Pratchett

That was the kind of life she'd had as a child, and it was the kind she wanted as an adult. But it hadn't worked out that way. Things in life seldom
did, she'd come to understand ~ Nicholas Sparks

One of the people in charge of props told me: "It's not my job necessarily to make things look exactly as they were in real life. But I want [the movie] to look so authentic that when you see it, you'll think it's part of your own personal history. It will be your life to hold onto."
That attention to detail--and that care and dedication--moved me, and I did everything I could to help them. Still, I didn't want to just put my memories in the mail or FedEx. To put me at ease, the studio offered to use a team of couriers so that the material would be in someone's hands each step of the way.
They sent a driver out one day. He was a big, hulking fellow who filled Chris's office the way Chris would have.
"I just have a few more things to pack up," I told him. "If you could just wait a second."
"Sure."
Bubba came in, still wearing his jammies. "Hey," he said to the guy. "You play darts?"
"Uh--"
By now Bubba was so used to people dropping by and playing with him that he didn't even need to ask who they were.
He'd also become pretty good at darts.
I wrapped up quickly, sparing the poor fellow the humiliation of losing to a kid whose voice wouldn't change for several more years. ~ Taya Kyle

I will fill my life with so much of positivity, happiness and brilliance that God will one day say with utmost pride,

"This is the most amazing Kaleidoscope to view". ~ Harshada Pathare

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him. ~ Childe Hassam

I'll walk as fast as I want, and I will take breaks whenever I feel like it. There is no one to follow, no one to keep up with. There's just me and this one beautiful day, this one moment, right here, now. ~ Elana K. Arnold

Many agricultural counties are far more important in the life of the State than their population bears to the entire population of the State. It is for this reason that I have never been in favor of restricting their representation in our State Senate to a strictly population basis. It is the same reason that the founding fathers of our country gave balanced representation to the States of the Union, equal representation in one House and proportionate representation based upon population in the other. ~ Earl Warren

There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. ~ Kurt Cobain

I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war. ~ Ben Barnes

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

MARG: You are so close.
STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, non conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Why, when we know that there's no such thing as perfect, do most of us spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to be everything to everyone? Is it that we really admire perfection? No - the truth is that we are actually drawn to people who are real and down-to-earth. We love authenticity and we know that life is messy and imperfect. ~ Brene Brown

You're still you, and he's still him. People don't change, Clara Belle. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't. Boone is who he is, and you are who you are. I would have warned you not to make the same mistake twice if I'd known you were even considering letting Boone Cavanaugh into your life again. ~ Nicole Williams

It has been more than twenty years since she lost her two daughters here, the one who was never given a name or a life, and her precious Usha. With thoughts of Usha comes the physical ache in her heart. There has not been a day since Usha's birth that Kavita has not thought of her, mourned her loss, and prayed for the hollow feelings of grief to melt away. But God has not listened. Or else he has not yet forgiven her. Because the heartache has endured. ~ Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand. ~ E. E. Cummings

People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It's really that simple. Once you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear. ~ Michael A. Singer

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Every lynching deprives its victim of his life without due process of law, and denies him an equal protection of the law. The States are charged with punishing all such invasions as the common rights of the citizens, but some of them have failed in their effort to do so, and others have not honestly tried. Meanwhile, lynchings continue, and though they do not increase in number, they show some tendency to increase in savagery. ~ H.L. Mencken

Don't seek a failure-less life.
Wear failure as a badge of honour. Seek a fearless life ! ~ Manoj Arora

Wine is the liquid form of the Goddess Tara, who is the saviour of all living creatures, the mother of all enjoyment and Release, the destroyer of dangers and disease, who burns up all sins and purifies the worlds, O Beloved , who grants all success and increases knowledge, understanding and learning. ~ Wendy Doniger

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience. ~ Jonas Salk

One must not be negligent in learning. In the Lun Yu it says: "To study and not to think is darkness. To think without study is dangerous." ~ Takeda Nobushige

The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

The Christian God is interested in relationship with us, and not just relationship, but union, and not just union, but such a union that everything He is and has - all glory and fullness, all joy and beauty and unbridled life - is to be shared with us and to become as much ours as it is His. The plan from the beginning, in the Christian vision, is that God would give Himself to us, and nothing less, so that we could be filled to overflowing with the divine life. ~ C. Baxter Kruger

To be a living sacrifice will involve all my time. God wants me to live every minute for Him in accordance with His will and purpose, sixty minutes of every hour, twenty-four hours of every day, being available to Him. No time can be considered as my own, or as "off-duty" or "free." I cannot barter with God about how much time I can give to serve Him. Whatever I am doing, be it a routine salaried job, or housework at home, be it holiday time and free, or after-work Christian youth activities, all should be undertaken for Him, to reveal His indwelling presence to those around me. The example of my life must be as telling as my preaching if He is to be honored. ~ Helen Roseveare

We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing. ~ Louisa May Alcott

Eat ten of your five a day and live twice as long ~ Benny Bellamacina

I don't have the educated knowledge of what textures, colors, shapes and spaces need to be put together to make something just right. I'm learning it by trial and error, which is something that's slow going. ~ Evangeline Lilly