We should get out of an experience only the wisdom that was in it-and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits on the hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on the hot stove-lid again…but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
-Mark Twain
What might be some examples of a person getting more out of an experience than it is teaching?
No one can really become educated without having pursued some study in which he [or she] took no interest-for it is part of the education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
-T. S. Eliot
Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Good advice usually works best when preceded by a bad scare.
-Al Batt
Are you usually willing to take advice? Or do you seem to need to learn everything by your own experience? When are you most likely to take advice? Explain how you felt when your good advice was rejected by someone-and that person ran into trouble as a result.
Education is of the hand as well as of the head and heart. Some of the gray matter seems to be in the fingers, which had better be familiar with their hidden wisdom.
-Mark Van Doren
LiberalEducation
Knowing includes knowing how to do, whether in poetry or in mechanics, whether with levers or with laws; and a time promises to come when the distinction between brain and hand is divested of its present snobbery.
-Mark Van Doren
Liberal Education
Ignoramus, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
-Ambrose Bierce
Have you learned lessons only of those who admire you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves againest you, and disuted the passage with you?
-Walt Whitman
Every sort of mastery is an increase of one’s freedom.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.
Mark Twain
What kinds of mastery could increase one’s freedom? Think of your own personal life as well as job or school. How might Twain’s advice actually be sound counsel? Which quotation is most in keeping with your personality?