“Evolutionarily, the function of attachment has been to protect the organism from danger. The attachment figure, an older, kinder, stronger, wiser other (Bowlby, 1982), functions as a safe base (Ainsworth et al., 1978), and is a presence that obviates fear and engenders a feeling of safety for the younger organism. The greater the feeling of safety, the wider the range of exploration and the more exuberant the exploratory drive (i.e., the higher the threshold before novelty turns into anxiety and fear). Thus, the fundamental tenet of attachment theory: security of attachment leads to an expanded range of exploration. Whereas fear constricts, safety expands the range of exploration. In the absence of dyadically constructed safety, the child has to contend with fear-potentiating aloneness. The child will devote energy to conservative, safety enhancing measures, that is, defense mechanisms, to compensate for what s missing. The focus on maintaining safety and managing fear drains energy from learning and exploration, stunts growth, and distorts personality development.”
“I have lived knowing nothing of the forest so there is nothing I can teach you. Go into the wild. Know the world....”
“Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature - as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos - to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.”
“If you stop learning, you forget what you ready know.”
“We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- to learn becomes to accumulate credits .”
“The act of reading is a skill that can be cultivated.”
“Be a lifelong student. The more you learn, the more you earn and the more self-confidence you will have.”
“I do not consider my deeds or my knowledge to be a great thing. The only fact is — and I can say this honestly — that I love learning and a solitary life.”
“The English seem to relish unsystematic learning of this kind, in the same manner that they embarked upon Grand Tours of Europe in pursuit of a peripatetic scholarship.”
“God designed the church to be a community of lifelong learners under the earthly guidance of leaders who are teachers at heart. The Christian faith is not a finite course of study for the front-end of adulthood. Our mind-set shouldn’t be to first do our learning and then spend the rest of our lives drawing from that original deposit of knowledge. Rather, ongoing health in the Christian life is inextricably linked to ongoing learning.”
“The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people s confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.”
“As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage.”
“Experience is the only subject worthwhile of study.”
“When we want to awaken a thought in anyone, what are the means at our disposal? One only, to produce in him by word and sign states of sensibility and of imagination, emotion and memory in which he will discover our idea and make it his own.”
“A library is chamber of treasures.”
“To read is to renew thy mind.”
“The act of reading is skill that can be cultivated.”