“No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness.”
“This is how I disappear in pieces. This is how I leave without moving from my place. This is how I dance away. This is how I m gone before you wake.”
“If you hesitate to learn from others, you will never learn anything new.”
“[...]make sure you raise your children by having them play in their studies, and don t use force.”
“Happiness is an art and the one who knows this art lives happily even if they don t have anything.”
“Peculiar I say, how so often the smallest, most seemingly insignificant details later unveil their faces as vital means for progression.”
“I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people. And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person at times before clearly seeing and grasping the necessity to improve. If you don t agree with me, just ask Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. I think Charles Dickens got it quite right.”
“To find out if there is actually such freedom one must be aware of one s own conditioning, of the problems, of the monotonous shallowness, emptiness, insufficiency of one s daily life, and above all one must be aware of fear. One must be aware of oneself neither introspectively nor analytically, but actually be aware of oneself as one is and see if it is at all possible to be entirely free of all those issues that seem to clog the mind. To explore, there must be freedom, not at the end, but right at the beginning. Unless one is free one cannot explore, investigate or examine. Two things are essential: freedom and the act of learning. One cannot learn about oneself unless one is free, free so that one can observe, not according to any pattern, formula or concept, but actually observe oneself as one is.”
“To inquire and to learn is the function of the mind, By learning I do not mean the mere cultivation of memory or the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to think clearly and sanely without illusion, to start from facts and not from beliefs and ideals. There is no learning if thought originates from conclusions. Merely to acquire information of knowledge is to not to learn. Learning implies the love of understanding and the love of doing a thing for itself. Learning is possible only when there is no coercion through influence, thought attachment or threat, through persuasive encouragement or subtle forms of reward. Most people think that learning is encouraged through comparison, whereas the contrary is the fact. Comparison brings about frustration and merely encourages envy, which is called competition. Like other forms of persuasion, comparison prevents learning and breeds fear.”
“How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.”
“Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it? What, indeed? It is art for art s sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored, you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee? For my education, Holmes. Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.”
“If you don’t use your new knowledge and skills within a relatively short space of time, then it may have been better never to have had the tantalising prospect of change for the better placed in front of you.”
“The most important skill for a new recruit from university will be the ability to learn.”
“A person s integrity develops early in life. Once formed, it is difficult to alter, change, or improve.”
“Learning voyage, the greatest adventure.”
“To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also it demands psychological energy. By the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict. So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you can proceed tearing the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all. You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system, - this comes about daily – but the psychological, the unconscious and the rationally, individually, deeply and superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority, and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity; no authority that function assumes and which becomes status. To understand all authority – of the gurus, of the Masters, and others – requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain.”
“Nobody was born a master; amateurs become experts because they did not give up on learning. You are going as far as you can if you’ll learn and apply!”