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I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine.
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“I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine.”

Mark Twain

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Source
The Innocents Abroad
Date
1869
Meaning

Meaning of “I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great…”

Direct experience forces revision of inherited mental pictures, making learning partly an act of discarding assumptions that no longer fit observed reality.

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The Innocents Abroad (1869), Chapter XLVI. In Palestine Twain says he must studiously and faithfully unlearn many inherited ideas because direct observation has altered the scale and meaning of what he had imagined. Verified against the scan-backed 1869 first edition.

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Change and GrowthGrowthGrowth MindsetHumilityLearning Quotes About Curiosity, Study & ExperienceMindsetPerspectiveTravel
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Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.
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“Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”

William James · Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking · 1907
Meaning & context

James presents pragmatism as a method that makes theories answer to practical consequences and experience instead of allowing abstract formulations to remain rigid and self-sufficient.

Source details

Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. The sentence follows James’s claim that theories become instruments rather than final answers.

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They teach us quite as much as we teach them.
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“They teach us quite as much as we teach them.”

Louisa May Alcott · Little Men · 1871
Voice: Fictional character · Friedrich Bhaer
Meaning & context

Education is reciprocal: adults may guide children, but close attention to children also teaches adults patience, perspective, honesty, and better ways of understanding growth.

Source details

Little Men; the observation describes the mutual education taking place in the Plumfield household and school rather than a one-way transfer of knowledge.

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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”

William James · The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy · 1897
Meaning & context

James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.

Source details

The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.

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You can’t yourself, but exterior influences can do it.
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“You can’t yourself, but exterior influences can do it.”

Mark Twain · What Is Man? · 1906
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Old Man
Meaning & context

The Old Man claims that opinions can change, but attributes the change to new evidence, conversation, study, and other influences entering from outside the individual.

Source details

What Is Man?, Old Man replying to the Young Man’s question about changing an automatic opinion; this is dialogic determinism, not neutral cognitive science.

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