She was learning something important: how to live within the sound of her own slow breathing, how to love the view when her eyes were shut.

The First BookOpen it.Go ahead, it won't bite.Well. . . Maybe a little.More a nip, like. A tingle.It's pleasurable, really.You see, it keeps on opening.You may fall in.Sure, it's hard to get started;remember learning to useknife and fork? Dig in:you'll never reach bottom.It's not like it's the end of the world--just the world as you thinkyou know it.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

...A world is supported by four things...The learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

Those [things] that we encounter for the first time immediately have a spiritual effect upon us. A child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame.

I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my ownmemorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, calledrote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,a great human gift disowned.

Be a lifelong student. The more you learn, the more you earn and the more self-confidence you will have.

Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards.

Educate every child to have a good head, good heart and kind spirit.

Ignorance can stifle learning, especially if the ignorant person believes that he or she is not ignorant.