Quotes about Learning

One Book is enough, but a thousand books is not too many!

No great saint lived without errors.

One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.

Those speak foolishly who ascribe their anger or their impatience to such as offend them or to tribulation. Tribulation does not make people impatient, but proves that they are impatient. So everyone may learn from tribulation how his heart is constituted.

from you, my dear Erasmus, let me obtain this request, that just as I bear with your ignorance in these matters, so you in turn will bear with my lack of eloquence.

I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

My temptations have been my masters in divinity.

For the statement of Isaiah (28:19) is true: "Trouble gives understanding"; likewise, hunger is the best condiment. For those who are afflicted have a better understanding of the Holy Scriptures; the smug and prosperous read them as if they were some poem written by Ovid.

I know a beautiful garden, where there are a great many children in fine little coats, and they go under the trees and gather beautiful apples and pears, cherries and plums; they sing and run about and are as happy as they can be. Sometimes they ride on nice little ponies, with golden bridles and silver saddles. I asked the man whose garden it is, "What little children are these?" And he told me, "They are little children who love to pray and learn and are good.

for no man, without trials and temptations, can attain to the true understanding of the Holy Scriptures. 

If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of those branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.