45 Lifelong Learning Quotes to be a Student of Life

Love quotes? Links to my all-time favorite intentional living quotes can be found at the bottom of this page.

What is lifelong learning?

“The ‘ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated’ pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. Therefore, it not only enhances social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development, but also self-sustainability, as well as competitiveness and employability.”
“Learning can no longer be divided into a place and time to acquire knowledge (school) and a place and time to apply the knowledge acquired (the workplace). Instead, learning can be seen as something that takes place on an ongoing basis from our daily interactions with others and with the world around us. It can create and shapeshift into the form of formal learning or informal learning, or self-directed learning.”¹

Speaking of self-directed learning, what is autodidacticism?

“Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools). Generally, an autodidact is an individual who chooses the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time.”
“Various terms are used to describe self-education. One such is heutagogy, coined in 2000 by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon of Southern Cross University in Australia; others are self-directed learning and self-determined learning. In the heutagogy paradigm, a learner should be at the centre of their own learning.”²

Here’s to the autodidactic, lifelong learners!

“The truth is that the only education is self-education. Teachers can impart information and make suggestions, but they are like sign-posts—they can only by example and precept point out the way. A sign-post is of no earthly use unless the person who consults it wants to go somewhere.” — Robert Shafer, 1921

Bonus—this more well-known quote came later:

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” — Isaac Asimov

45 Lifelong Learning Quotes that will Inspire You to be a Student of Life

Wonder & Curiosity Quotes

1. “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” — Socrates

2. “Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.” — William Arthur Ward

3. “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.” — Samuel Johnson

4. “Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.” — Eugene S. Wilson

5. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.” — Plutarch

Books & Reading Quotes

6. “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” — Fran Lebowitz

7. “Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” — Epictetus

8. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.” — Charlie Munger

9. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

Knowledge & Wisdom Quotes

10. “What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge, but its quality. You can know many things without knowing that which is most important.” — Blaise Pascal

11. “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” — Peter Drucker

12. “A ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.” — Thomas Edison

13. “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” — Lao Tzu

14. “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov

15. “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” — Albert Einstein

16. “It is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom.” — Lao Tzu

17. “The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy

Life as the Teacher Quotes

18. “The world is a university and everyone in it is a teacher. Make sure when you wake up in the morning, you go to school.” — T. D. Jakes

19. “Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching.” — Unknown

20. “All the world is my school and all humanity is my teacher.” — George Whitman

Learning as a Never-ending Process Quotes

21. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi

22. “Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will.” — Vernon Howard

23. “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.” — Lloyd Alexander

24. “I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor….'” — Thomas Edison

25. “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” — Eartha Kitt

Learning How to Learn & Think Quotes

26. “The most important thing you learn in school is how to learn.” — Derrick Fung

27. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” — David Foster Wallace

28. “Learning without doing is wasted.” — Derek Sivers

Learning How to Live Quotes

29. “I’d always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright…I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live…ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life.” — Dan Millman

30. “We don’t mind spending 15 years on education, why not the same to become a better human being?” — Matthieu Ricard

31. “To learn to read and write a simple language, you take 12 years of schooling to read, write, understand; that’s all you’re doing in school…For this you’re taking 12 years. To transform your life you want to do it in 2 minutes. So is that what your life is worth? So if your life is worthwhile, is it not important that you invest a certain amount of time and energy?” — Sadhguru

Realizing How Little You Actually Know Quotes

32. “No one knows everything. No one knows nothing. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle.” — Lama Surya Das

33. “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” — Albert Einstein

34. “The more you know, the less you understand.” — Lao Tzu

35. “I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” — Socrates

36. “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.” — Euripides

Where Learning Ultimately Leads Quotes

37. “The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.” — Oscar Wilde

38. “The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” — Charlie Munger

39. “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer

40. “Change is the end result of all true learning.” — Leo Buscaglia

41. “The more you know, the less you need.” — Yvon Chouinard

42. “A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously.” — Nathaniel Branden

43. “The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.” — M. Scott Peck

44. “You don’t become awakened by adding more content to your mind. In fact, those that have awakened say that they actually know less. What comes with awakening is the ability to embrace ‘not knowing.'” — Eckhart Tolle

45. “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.” — Robert Frost

Which ones were your favorites? Let me know in the comments!

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Footnotes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelong_learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism