Some Thoughts on Learning, Lawyering, and Life

Others have often said it best and offered wisdom to help us gain perspective. (Amy Jarmon)

• I did not make sense of one single word spoken today. - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (in a letter to his father after his first day in law school)

• Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. - Confucius

• Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought with ardor and attended to with diligence. - Abigail Adams

• "Learn" is an active verb. - Dennis Tonsing

• Borrowed brains have no value. - Yiddish proverb

• To know the law is not merely to understand the words, but as well their force and effect. - Justinian

• If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it. - John Searle

• Writing is thinking made visible. - Joe Kimble

• Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you sow. - Robert Louis Stevenson

• You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind. - Irish proverb

• It's not the time you put in, but what you put in the time. - Burg's Philosophy

• Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of. - Benjamin Franklin

• The two offices of memory are collection and distribution. - Samuel Johnson

• Repetition is the mother of learning. - Russian proverb

• If you study to remember, you will forget; but, if you study to understand, you will remember. - Unknown

• You can eat an elephant one bite at a time. - Chinese proverb

• To succeed, we must first believe that we can. - Michael Korda

• To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. - Joseph Chilton Pearce

• Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. - Dennis Waitley

• A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. - John Burroughs

• The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today. - Abraham Lincoln

• What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. - Pericles

• Be the change you wish to see in the world. - Mahatma Gandhi