A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child as an eight- or nine-year-old asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels and I would say 'What does that mean?'

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.

You can be self-empowered and still learning about how you think about things daily.

In the transmission of human culture people always attempt to replicate to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning not DNA.

This life is a process of learning.

Wear your learning like your watch in a private pocket and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.

It's mainly about working hard and proving to people you're serious about it and stretching yourself and learning. The mistake a lot of actors make particularly young ones is allowing themselves to feel that they're the finished articles the bee's knees and it's not true.

The learning process is something you can incite literally incite like a riot.

What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school but a different way of looking at the world and learning.