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“Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge: but he that hateth reproof is brutish.”
Learning requires willingness to be corrected; rejecting every form of reproof blocks the feedback needed for growth.
Source note: Proverbs 12:1, King James Version.
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“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Partial knowledge can produce misplaced confidence; the warning favors deeper study over shallow certainty.
Source note: An Essay on Criticism, Part II; Pope warns that shallow learning can produce premature confidence before deeper study tempers judgment.
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“They teach us quite as much as we teach them.”
Voice: Fictional character · Friedrich Bhaer
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 note: 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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“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator, focalized through Lord Henry
The wit turns “experience” into a retrospective label for errors, suggesting that mistakes become useful only when understood.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 4; third-person narration focalized through Lord Henry reflects that experience is the name people give to their mistakes.
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“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
Intellectual confidence can be improved by beginning with questions rather than pretending certainty too early.
Source note: The Advancement of Learning, Book I; Bacon contrasts premature certainty with an inquiry willing to begin from doubt and work toward firmer knowledge.
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“The education of character is very much a question of models.”
People absorb conduct from examples around them, so lived models can teach more powerfully than rules that are contradicted by behavior.
Source note: Self-Help, Chapter XII, “Example—Models,” Project Gutenberg #935. Smiles argues that character education depends heavily on models because people unconsciously mould themselves after the characters, manners, habits and opinions around them.