top of page
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov

"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."

Standard 
 Customized
"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."

Exlpore more Education quotes

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children's librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I'll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"Study the past if you would define the future."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"Ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners."

Quote_1.png
Asa Don Brown

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths-until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"There is only one school of literature - that of talent."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"My darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige, or taupe, with chocolate paws and the tail the same. Moreover, his tail is comparatively short, so his croup has something of a little dog, or rather, a kangaroo, and that's its colour, too. And that special silkiness of short fur, and some very tender white tints on its folds, and wonderful clear-blue eyes, turning transparently green towards evening, and a pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet " it's unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. She had never been in close contact with such people - there was no one to compare him with except those inspired eccentrics, musicians and poets whose image one knows as clearly and as vaguely as that of a Roman Emperor, an inquisitor or a comedy miser. Her memory contained a modest dimly lit gallery with a sequence of all the people who had in any way caught her fancy."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment."
Quote_1.png
Vladimir Nabokov
"A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things-how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver-and this inability enhanced my oppression."
bottom of page