"Unlearn" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; 325 Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, } These sparks with awkward vanity display } What the fine gentleman wore yesterday; } 330 And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... fail to enlist the economic features so necessary as assistants. For amid all our disadvantages we are to a large extent arbiters of our fortunes, for we can by an indomitable will dispel many, many seeming mountains that encumber our way. But we have much to unlearn, and especially that the road to financial prosperity is not chiefly the dictum of the facile mouth, but through the manifestation of skilled hands and routine of business methods, however much the mouth may attempt to compete, conscious of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... powerful in the Scriptures, and mightily gifted with an enlightened reason; and this letter shows that he himself has been moving rapidly in the direction in which Buenderlin and Denck were travelling, though neither now nor at any time was Franck a mere copier of other men's ideas.[5] "We must unlearn," he writes, "all that we have learned from our youth up from the papists, and we must change everything we have got from the Pope or from Luther and Zwingli." He predicts that the external Church will never be set up again, "for the inward enlightenment by ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... ones. And here I must make a confession. It was much easier for my sister, unversed in any phase of canning, to master this new method than it was for me with my four years' training course and my five years of teaching canning behind me. And this is the reason. She had nothing to "unlearn," she knew no other method whereas I had to ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... of and how much they weigh. We thought for such a long time that our toil would end in something; that we might become as gods, knowing good and evil. Now we are at the end of our tether, we see clearly enough that it has all been worse than vain; how good if we could unlearn it all, scatter the building of phantasmal knowledge in which we dwell so uncomfortably! It is too late. The gods never take back their gifts; we wearied them with our prayers into granting us this one, and now they sit in ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... (full of scorns For men unlearn'd and simple phrase) A child would bring it all its praise, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... for more besides, for Mrs. Thackeray's not young, that's clear enough; and I know there's a good many things that she's not ignorant of. She's precious knowing about many things that don't do her much good; and if the books could unlearn her, I'd say for one let her keep 'em. But as for looking at Margaret's books—why, Brother Cross, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... columns, my cell shall be upon thy architrave and, what is more difficult still, for thy sake I will endeavour to be intolerant and prejudiced. I will love thee alone. I will learn thy tongue, and unlearn all others. I will be unjust for all that concerns not thee; I will be the servant of the least of thy children. I will exalt and natter the present inhabitants of the earth which thou gavest to Erechthea. I will endeavour to like their very defects; I will endeavour to ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Peggy, I suppose; but it is hard to unlearn so much old schooling and to accept of new teachings. Did your faith support you when you were perplexed and disappointed—when friends were unfaithful, and the world ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... if she were going to speak, but Klesmer lifted up his hand and said, decisively, "I know. You have exercised your talents—you recite—you sing—from the drawing-room standpunkt. My dear Fraeulein, you must unlearn all that. You have not yet conceived what excellence is: you must unlearn your mistaken admirations. You must know what you have to strive for, and then you must subdue your mind and body to unbroken discipline. Your mind, I say. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... proud station was the pledge for their chivalrous devotion. But why do I discuss the question with thee? He who deserts his faith may well forget that his birth was noble. Go, boy, join those with whom your heart is already linked. Your lesson will be an easy one—you have nothing to unlearn. The songs of the Girondins are already more grateful to your ear than our sacred canticles. Go, I say, since between us, henceforth, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the inquiry whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, on the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It has but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest—a mere platform of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds—from the deep, compact, finely woven ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... matters, so far as the commander was concerned; official dignity forbade any further interest. But it was not so very long since Mr. White was senior midshipman, and it takes a man until he is admiral of the fleet to unlearn all he knew then and forget the curiosity of ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... Pope is speaking,—not always as orators speak, it is true, but gravely, at least, and with that indefinable air of dignity which the habit of command seldom fails to impart. The language is sonorous, and if you have had the good sense to unlearn your barbarous application of English sounds—cunningly devised by Nature herself to keep damp fogs and cold winds out of the mouth—to Italian vowels, which the same judicious mother framed with equal cunning to let soft and odoriferous airs into it, you will probably understand what ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... played at another, the reason being that he has only to modify the action of neuro-muscular mechanisms, not associate new mechanisms together to the same extent as in the formation of a habit of a widely different kind, as rowing a boat. At the same time, one must always unlearn something—break up old habits, to some extent. An opera singer often makes a failure of oratorio at first. The sets of reflexes or the habits, bodily and mental, which he has found valuable for the ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... He should have been sent to some planet which had been under Imperial rule for some time, where the Proconsulate ran itself in a well-worn groove, and where he could at leisure learn the procedures and unlearn some of the unrealisms absorbed at the University from professors too well insulated from ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... Japanese mind is filled with idols. We mention sin, and he thinks of eating flesh or the killing of insects. The word holiness reminds him of crowds of pilgrims flocking to some famous shrine, or of some anchorite sitting lost in religions abstraction till his legs rot off. He has much error to unlearn before he can take ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... gravity: their discourses are such as belong to their age, their calling, and their breeding; such as are becoming of them, and of them only. Some of his persons are vicious, and some virtuous; some are unlearn'd, or (as Chaucer calls them) lewd, and some are learn'd. Even the ribaldry of the low characters is different: the Reeve, the Miller, and the Cook are several men, and distinguished from each other, as much as the mincing Lady Prioress and the broad-speaking ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Scottish clerk, who had spent a year only in the far Athabasca district. He had not depended on birth or influence for his advancement, was not yet wholly immersed in the traditions or prejudices of either company, and had consequently nothing to unlearn. Montreal became the Canadian headquarters of the company, but now the annual meeting of the traders where he as Governor presided, was held at Norway House. The offices in London were united, and thus ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... womanly than to be a 'freak,' as I should have been had every man, woman and child looked upon me as a princess. I did not travel through your land for the purpose of exhibiting myself, but to learn and unlearn." ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... realized. As a beginner, her first steps were necessarily slow; but she took pains, and had no bad habits or evil accents to unlearn, and after a while she "got hold" of the language and went on more rapidly. Marian's fluent chatter stimulated her to try to talk as fast also, though Mademoiselle Bougereau, their teacher, found a great deal of fault with Marian, and said that many ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... I have naturally a horror for most vices. The answer of Antisthenes to him who asked him, which was the best apprenticeship "to unlearn evil," seems to point at this. I have them in horror, I say, with a detestation so natural, and so much my own, that the same instinct and impression I brought of them with me from my nurse, I yet retain, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... others which have existed long in good form have been left untouched. In the great masterpieces no liberties have been taken with the text without making known the fact, and in every case the most reliable edition has been followed. It is hoped that children will have nothing to "unlearn" from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... which was the law of authority in Mississippi. Very few lawyers coming from the common-law States, have ever been able to succeed in Louisiana, especially after having practised in other States for any length of time. They have not only to learn the civil law, but to unlearn the common. Some, who did not know the extraordinary powers of Prentiss's mind, feared he, like many others who had made the attempt, would fail; but, almost from the moment of his advent at the New Orleans bar, his success ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... sounds like a well-delivered speech. Now, the fault was not because Mr. Greeley did not know how to read as well as almost any man that ever lived, if not quite: but in his youth he learned to read wrong; and, as it is ten times harder to unlearn anything than it is to learn it, he, like thousands of others, could never stop to unlearn it, but carried it on ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... little, as an amateur, of both hewing and building, from the circumstance, that when the undertakings of my schoolboy days involved, as they sometimes did, the erection of a house, I used always to be selected as the mason of the party. And all that I had learned on these occasions I had now to unlearn. In the course of a few months, however, I did unlearn it all; and then, acquiring in less than a fortnight a very considerable mastery over the mallet—for mine was one of the not unfrequent cases in which the mechanical knock seems, after many an ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... months work, so far from being useful to him in a new effort was detrimental. He had a wrong pronunciation, and there was not a single verb in the whole language to which he did not attribute a meaning other than the true one. He had to unlearn, then relearn. After ten months labours he returned to France unsuccessful. Under a teacher's guidance, with much less labour, he would have ...
— The Aural System • Anonymous
... There had come a great change over their lives, and they had drifted farther apart again. He himself had gone out into the world something of a scholar and something of a pedant, and he had found that all his ideas of life had lain rusting in his country home, and that he had almost as much to unlearn as to learn. With ample means, and an eager thirst for knowledge, he had passed from one to another of the great seats of learning of the world. But his lesson was not taught him at one of them. He learned it not amongst the keen conflict of intellect at the universities, not in the toils of ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... one for girls, and one for infants—were erected about six years ago, and are still maintained at the expense of the Messrs Vivian. At the time of our visit, there were 600 of the rising population of the place doing their utmost to unlearn the Welsh idiom, and to acquire the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety. We regret that we cannot dwell on this the most gratifying circumstance of our visit. Messrs Vivian & Sons are unquestionably great copper-smelters, but, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... inseparable possession. The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning, answered, "To unlearn what is evil." That is to say, to the Cynic conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that this double training, in language as well as in thought, imposes somewhat too heavy a burden upon the young, especially when, at the age of three years old, they are taken from the maternal care and taught to unlearn the old language—except for the purpose of repeating it in the presence of their Mothers and Nurses—and to learn the vocabulary and idiom of science. Already methinks I discern a weakness in the grasp of mathematical truth at the present time as compared with the more robust intellect ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... others have united it with the Palaeozoic age. For many years I myself adopted the latter of these two views, and associated the Carboniferous epoch with the Palaeozoic age. But it is the misfortune of progress that one is forced not only to unlearn a great deal, but, if one has been in the habit of communicating his ideas to others, to destroy much of his own work. I now find myself in this predicament; and after teaching my students for years ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ideas. Generally she names all her friends anew; often her tone of voice is a little altered; sometimes she introduces with particular combinations of letters some odd inflection, which she maintains rigorously and cannot unlearn. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... hidden from them. A bold and eloquent preacher would be no where listened to with more freedom than in this State, nor with more firmness of mind. They might need a preparatory discourse on the text of 'Prove all things, hold fast that which is good,' in order to unlearn the lesson that reason is an unlawful guide in religion. They might startle on being first awaked from the dreams of the night, but they would rub their eyes at once, and look the spectres boldly in ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... with the modern passion for efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, "are interwoven with a mass of those ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... the Empire, the melancholy book of Austrian dominion in Italy might be fairly said to be closed forever. A new era was dawning for the House of Hapsburg, which was to show that, unlike the Bourbons, it could learn and unlearn. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... future, which the young girl seemed to see just then, with grave, prophetic glance; a future of difficulty, struggle, temptation; of old habits and old teachings to be battled with; of new ones to be formed; of much to learn and unlearn, and try, and try again; but perhaps—she still seemed to see with the young girl's earnest eyes that for the moment had quite outgrown the child—a future faithfully lived and well; not frittered away in beautiful ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... conquest of it! To this is to be added, that when virtue is become habitual, when the temper of it is acquired, what was before confinement ceases to be so by becoming choice and delight. Whatever restraint and guard upon ourselves may be needful to unlearn any unnatural distortion or odd gesture, yet in all propriety of speech, natural behaviour must be the most easy and unrestrained. It is manifest that, in the common course of life, there is seldom any inconsistency between our ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... should let them go, and begin counting afresh.' So you, since this is your mind, had better reconcile yourself now to living like an ordinary man; you will give up your extravagant haughty hopes and put yourself on a level with the commonalty; if you are sensible, you will not be ashamed to unlearn in your old age, and change your course for ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... that they must unlearn certain things the schools had taught them: preoccupation with the relative merits of Gothic and Classic—tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they must learn certain neglected lessons from the engineer, lessons that they will be able immeasurably to better, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the Parnassian Mount. We have talked of the High Ideal, and practised and encouraged ad infinitum the Low Natural, and too often have descended to the worse, the Low Unnatural; so that, upon the whole, we have to unlearn very much before we can be said to be in the rudiments of Real Art. Let us suppose one born with every natural endowment, with imagination, and a power of imitation. The mind, after all, is fed with realities; there is in it also process of digestion, which converts the real into the imaginative. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... however, artists who have too much self-confidence, that is ill-founded confidence, founded rather upon a certain dexterity than upon a habit of thought; they are like the improvisatori in poetry; and most commonly, as Metastasio acknowledged of himself, had much to unlearn, to acquire a habit of thinking with selection. To be able to draw and to design with rapidity, is, indeed, to be master of the grammar of art; but in the completion, and in the final settlement of the design, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... school, where everything was done to bring it prominently under one's notice. Anything that is worth knowing one practically teaches oneself, and the rest obtrudes itself sooner or later. The reason one's elders know so comparatively little is because they have to unlearn so much that they acquired by way of education before we were born. Of course I'm a believer in Nature-study; as I said to Lady Beauwhistle, if you want a lesson in elaborate artificiality, just watch the studied ...
— Reginald • Saki
... thing to break through a habit, and a yet harder thing to go contrary to our own will. Yet if thou overcome not slight and easy obstacles, how shalt thou overcome greater ones? Withstand thy will at the beginning, and unlearn an evil habit, lest it lead thee little by little into worse difficulties. Oh, if thou knewest what peace to thyself thy holy life should bring to thyself, and what joy to others, methinketh thou wouldst be more zealous ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... O cruel girl! unlearn the wicked art Of that rapacious hag! For everywhere Wealth murders love. But thy poor lover's heart Is ever thine, ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... bellicose time it was nearly forty years to the appearance of Holmes' admiring and reverent life of Emerson, and in that long and stirring period there was much for him to learn, and something to unlearn. Who does not learn much in forty years? For one thing, the character and mind of the poet-philosopher were at length clearly revealed, and the uneasy swarm of imitators had shrunk out of sight. And as to slavery, the eyes of all men had been opened. Not only ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... speakers really have to learn something different from their habitual pronunciation, Mr. Jones is right in making a separate style of it, and he is also justified in the degraded forms of his style B, for those are what these speakers have to unlearn; nor is any fault to be found with ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... estate agent!" reflected Croyden. "The man who, according to our way of thinking, is the acme of hustle and bustle and business, and schemes to trap the unwary. Truly, the Eastern Shore has much to learn—or we have much to unlearn! Well, I have tried the one—and failed. Now, I'm going to try the other. It seems to promise ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... precision. These instances are sufficient to show the sort of errors which grammar introduces into language. We are not considering the question of its utility to the beginner in the study. Even to him the best grammar is the shortest and that in which he will have least to unlearn. It may be said that the explanations here referred to are already out of date, and that the study of Greek grammar has received a new character from comparative philology. This is true; but it is also true that the traditional grammar has still a great hold ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... be owned withal, the Piece is crude in parts, and far enough from perfect. Our good painter has yet several things to learn, and to unlearn. His brush is not always of the finest; and dashes about, sometimes, in a recognizably sprawling way: but it hits many a feature with decisive accuracy and felicity; and on the palette, as usual, lie ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... me: ... the skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine: and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.... So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... is now being made to Christianize the Australian blacks. It seems to prosper if the blacks can be kept away from the debasing influence of bad whites. They have no serious vices of their own, very little to unlearn, and are docile enough. In some cases black children educated at the mission schools are turning out very well. But, on the other hand, there are many instances of these children conforming to the habits of civilization for some years and then suddenly feeling "the ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... she wrote English history as such a person might be supposed to write it. With every intention to be honest, her book has many facts and opinions which boys and girls will have to take more time to unlearn than they spent in learning, unless they intend to be children ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... were found to have an income of $20.00 a week. "Well," said the visitor, "that is very little money on which to raise a family." The agent felt that this visitor had not only a great deal to learn, but a great deal to unlearn. ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... a good deal to unlearn,' answered Robert. 'I hoped to have had our logging-bee before your arrival, and then the farm would have looked tidier; but I ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... is the curse of time. Alas! In grief I am not all unlearn'd; Once thro' mine own doors Death did pass; [3] One went, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... reform of the seventeenth century was a revolution in the simplest elements of worship: it called upon the son to unlearn the sign of the cross that his mother had taught him. Such a change would have been hazardous anywhere, but it caused a peculiarly serious disturbance in Russia, where all prayer is connected with a kind of ceremonial of repeated bowings and crossings, which more closely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... antagonist, nor challenge all comers in disputation before you have supported a thesis; and in like manner, it stands to reason, you cannot learn to converse till you have the world to converse with; you cannot unlearn your natural bashfulness, or awkwardness, or stiffness, or other besetting deformity, till you serve your time in some school of manners. Well, and is it not so in matter of fact? The metropolis, the court, the great houses of the land, are the centres to which at stated times ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... about, and beheld the Puny Fox beside him, who took up the word and spoke, smiling as a man in great glee: "O maiden of the Rose, I am Hallblithe's thrall, and his scholar, to unlearn the craft of lying, whereby I have done amiss towards both him and thee. Whereof I will tell thee all the tale soon. But now I will say that it is true that we depart to-morrow for Cleveland by the Sea, thou and he, and I in company. Now I would ask thee, Hallblithe, if thou ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. But these nations have come out of the 'pre-economic stage' too soon; they have been put to learn while yet only too apt to unlearn. Such cases do not vitiate, they confirm, the principle—that a nation which has just gained variability without losing legality has a singular likelihood to ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... these differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Master Morality,' quoth he, 'I must e'en unlearn some of the tricks of my trade. Od's feet, man, if ye object to me, what the henker would ye think of some whom I have known? However, let that pass. It is time that we were at the wars, for our good swords will not ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lump, as some fine fellows do, because nations are composed of very different individuals, and I know only one to the million; but I do take on me to say that the individual Herr who executed Doctor Faustus at Homburg that night had everything to learn, except what he had to unlearn. His person was obese; his delivery of the words was mouthing, chewing, and gurgling; and he uttered the notes in tune, but without point, pathos, or passion; a steady lay-clerk from York or Durham Cathedral would have done a little better, because he would have been ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... When first starting on an Atlantic steamer, our rest is hindered by the screw; after a short time, it is hindered if the screw stops. A uniform impression is practically no impression. One cannot either learn or unlearn without pains ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... be in th' shack," replied Mr. Cassidy. "Cayuses know so much that it takes a month to unlearn them. I wouldn't like to bet they ain't ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... Wrtemberg for a subsidy, at the same time furiously attacking his old opponents. This so exasperated the chief men of the Court, that they persuaded the Duke to recall Frischlin; but instead of finding a welcome from his old patron, he was cast into prison, in order that he might unlearn his presumption, and acquire the useful knowledge that modesty is the chief ornament of a learned man. But Frischlin did not agree with another ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... swim with it philosophically; to call the desires of the ordinary self of any great section of the community edicts of the national mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a general, a philosophic, and an imposing expression. A generous statesman may [lv] honestly, therefore, soon unlearn any disposition to put his tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate them with fervour and impulsiveness. Therefore a plan such as that which we have indicated does not seem a plan so likely to find favour as a plan ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... kind. I must unlearn you a little of your kindness. You are mine, now, darling; and I want all of you ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... for man, and as you have given much study to the works and ways and reputed words of the All-seeing One, I want you to aid me in helping men to look upward—to soar like the eagle above the things of earth, as well as to consider the interests of others, and so, as far as may be, unlearn selfishness. Will you ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from them lessons which I never wish to unlearn. Whatever else I saw about them, this I saw,—that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and injustice from which the child's heart,—"child of the devil" though you may call him,—instinctively, and, as I believe, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... in answer to your advertisement for a secretary, in which you ask that the experience of the applicant be set forth. I have had no experience whatsoever as a secretary. Therefore, although I might have a great deal to learn, I should have nothing to unlearn. ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... 'em," said he; "though you'll have to unlearn that name, my young whipstercock, seein' we're here to stay for a while. The Earl marched down into Fowey last night while you were asleep, and is down there now making it right and tight. Do you ever play at blind-man's ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... book, and conveyed to new-comers by word of mouth, and their often mistaken impressions of many simple things are partly caused by the erroneous expressions and descriptions which they have heard or read. It takes the first several years of a residence in India to gradually unlearn the things which have been wrongly learnt. The stray visitor does not stay long enough to get his view straightened out, and when he returns to write his book about India ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... Sergius replied, "the denunciation of impiety cannot be sinful, else I have to unlearn all I have ever been taught; and being the chief Shepherd of an honorable Brotherhood, is it not thy duty to cry out at every appearance of wrong? That His Serenity, the Patriarch, receives thy acquittal and is notably an exception to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... and ass in homage low Obedient to their Maker bow: Bows too the unlearn'd heartless crowd Whose minds the sensual feast ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... distinctions from brutes. We should, therefore, endeavor to turn this peculiar talent to our advantage, and consider the organs of speech as the instruments of understanding; we should be very careful not to use them as the weapons of vice, or tools of folly, and do our utmost to unlearn any trivial or ridiculous habits, which tend to lessen the value of such an inestimable prerogative. It is, indeed, imagined by some philosophers, that even birds and beasts (tho without the power of articulation) ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... minds to lower views of art, and have, by a fascinating practice, acquired an inordinate love for its minor beauties. It is true their tendency is to teach, to cultivate: but in art there is too often as much to unlearn as to learn, and the unlearning is the more irksome task; prejudice, self-gratulation, have removed the humility which is the first step in the ladder of advancement. With the public at large, the Discourses have done more; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable. For me, I think I speak as I was taught; 265 I always see the garden and God there A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... it is for mortals to unlearn Beliefs bred in the marrow of their bones! How hard it is for mortals to discern The truth that preaches from the silent stones, The silent hills, the silent universe, While Error cries in sanctimonious tones That ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... years afterward he wrote: "The favorable reception of this prompted me to extend my original plan, which led to a further investigation of the principles of language. After all my reading and observation for the course of ten years I have been able to unlearn a considerable part of what I learnt in early life, and at thirty years of age can with confidence affirm that our modern grammars have done much more hurt than good. The authors have labored to prove what is obviously absurd, namely, that our language ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... styles with different subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town, and court. Some by old words to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze the unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso[15] in the play, These sparks with awkward vanity display What the fine gentleman wore yesterday; 330 And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets dress'd. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... be that these most rueful, loathly things have loved, and hoped, and labored through all their days for such an end as this! Escape from death! ... alas, there is no escape, . . 'tis evident we all must die, . . die, and with dust-quenched eyes unlearn our knowledge of the sun, the stars, the marvels of the universe,—for us no more shall the flowers bloom or the sweet birds sing; the poem of the world will write itself anew in every roseate flushing of the dawn,—but we,—we who have joyed therein,—we who ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... added thoughtfully, "gettin' married sure needs special savvee. What I mean," he explained, seeing the amused wonder in the girl's now wide eyes, "you kind o' need eddicatin' to git married. Y'see, when you get fixed that way you sort of, in a manner of speakin', got to unlearn things you never learnt, an' learn them things what can't never be taught. What I mean is, marriage is a sort of eddication of itself, wot don't learn you ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... are five-and-twenty you must establish a character that will serve you all your life." As habit strengthens with age, and character becomes formed, any turning into a new path becomes more and more difficult. Hence, it is often harder to unlearn than to learn; and for this reason the Grecian flute-player was justified who charged double fees to those pupils who had been taught by an inferior master. To uproot an old habit is sometimes a more painful thing, and vastly ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... about two out of six-and-twenty. It's particular attention that's been paid to your education, I perceive; you've nothing to unlearn anyhow, that's something. Now, sir, do you think that a classical scholar and a gentleman born, like me, is to demane myself by hearing you puzzle at the alphabet? You're quite mistaken, Mr Keene, you must gain your first elements second-hand; ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... I think, my dear,' said Lady Kenton, greatly touched. 'You have nothing to unlearn, and there is nothing needful to the position but what any person of moderate ability and good sense can acquire, and I am quite sure that Lord Northmoor would be far less happy without you, even in the long-run, besides the distress you would cause him now. It is not a brilliant, ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces, and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of man. For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man dignified. Yet even the mob you should study in a capital, as Shakespeare did in his 'Julius Caesar' and 'Coriolanus;' for only so can you know it in its quiddity. I conjure you, child, to get your sense of men ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... "now that I come to think of it, I do not wonder that father thought I had lost my reason, as it would be impossible for him to grasp this great truth as readily as you or I. To do so, he would have to unlearn in these few minutes all that he had ever learned regarding this false creation; with you and I, mother, it would be easier; we only believed, and belief is never absolute conviction, and can more readily be changed. I read a parable to-day that ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... over what has been done. For, after all, the truth is, that Scottish Archaeology is still so much in its infancy, that it is only now beginning to guess its powers, and feel its deficiencies. It has still no end of lessons to learn, and perhaps some to unlearn, before it can manage to extract the true metal of knowledge from the ore and dross of exaggeration in which many of its inquiries have become enveloped. At this present hour we virtually know far less of the Archaeology and history of Scotland ten or fifteen centuries ago than we ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... succeeded by the Duke of Portland. His 'coarse manners' were due to a neglected childhood. In the fragment of his Autobiography he describes 'the domestic brutality and ill-usage he experienced at home,' in the South of Ireland. 'It cost me,' he continues, 'more to unlearn the habits, manners, and principles which I then imbibed, than would have served to qualify me for any role whatever through life.' Fitzmaurice's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... imitating his arts, they have learned, like him, to traverse the forest; and, in every season, to subsist in the desert. They have, perhaps, recovered a lesson, which it has cost civilized nations many ages to unlearn, that the fortune of a man is entire while he ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... of that." Stanton stared into space for a moment, then nodded his head. "Of course. It would take too long to teach them. It wouldn't be worth all the trouble it would take to make them unlearn their fallacies and learn the new facts. It would take generations to do it unless this hypothetical other race killed off all the adult Nipes and started the little ones off fresh. And that didn't happen, because if it had, the ritual-taboo system would have died out, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with many a juvenile reminiscence) must by this time be prepared for our moral; and it is very briefly this:—Is it not time to consider the budding brain as entitled to fair play? We, the dear middle-aged people, must surely remember that it has taken us much toil and trouble to unlearn many things. We know, that, when we pen anything for our coevals, it is with due attention to such facts as we can command,—that we have a wholesome fear of criticism,—that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Bible was his first duty. In setting about it, he came to it as a little child; all he sought for was the simple truth, uncrushed by human traditions, unmingled with human dogmas, untrammelled by human interpretations, unadulterated by human systems. He found that he had a vast amount to unlearn, and saw clearly that if he fearlessly pursued his inquiries they would lead him so far from the belief of popular ignorance, as very probably to bar all worldly success in the sacred profession which he had chosen. But he knew that ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... old and fanciful and petulant before their time. It seems a sad waste of life that! Because so many of them are spirits that could have loved finely and devotedly all the time. But here," she said, "they unlearn their caprices, and live a life by strict rule—and they go out hence to have the care of children, or to tend broken lives into tranquillity—and some of them, nay most of them, find heavenly lovers of their own. They are odd, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... learn that at school, nor at school was it possible he should unlearn it. He acquired that belief from his home, from the conversation of his equals, from the behaviour of his inferiors; he found it in the books and newspapers he has read, he breathed it in with his ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... style and diction are likely to offend his Roman readers, and in the introduction to his Metamorphoses he begs for their indulgence. The elder Seneca in his Controversiae remarks of a Spanish fellow-countryman "that he could never unlearn that well-known style which is brusque and rustic and characteristic of Spain," and Spartianus in his Life of Hadrian tells us that when Hadrian addressed the senate on a certain occasion, his rustic pronunciation excited the laughter of the senators. But the peculiarities ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour. He has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his praise, been the severest of his own critics, and has not been too proud either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... is; but both Alfaretta and I recognized it at once. You see poor Jim almost taught himself to write. He'd begun that even before I first saw him and it's hard to unlearn things, you know. Else, Jim's so smart he'd have written better than any of us by this time. Yes, indeed! Poor Jim is very, very clever!" said ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... their hearers, that if they do not believe the Bible (or the Church), they can have no firm religion or morality, and will have no reason to give against following brutal appetite. This doctrine it is, that so often makes men atheists in Spain, and profligates in England, as soon as they unlearn the national creed: and the school which have done the mischief, moralize over the wickedness of human nature when it comes to pass instead of blaming the falsehood ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... his own act, this or that. And they have to be taught with all the force and gravity and dignity which befits the subject, and in such a way that after years will find nothing to smile at and nothing to unlearn. They have to be taught as the mind of the present time can best apprehend them, not according to the portraiture of mediaeval pictures, but in a language perhaps not more true and adequate in itself but less boisterous and more comprehensible ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... warning words of the Great Spirit. If you will return to your cabins, and forget the things that were taught you, and unlearn the tongue of the white man, to use again the language of your fathers—if, instead of the rifle, you will shoot with the bow, and cause the arrow to whistle instead of the bullet—if you will cease to give the spoils of the chace and the produce of your fields for beads and ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the student who supposed classifications to be matters of moment, and who laboriously learned to label the animals and birds of his acquaintance with an authoritative Latin name, was perpetually obliged to unlearn what he had acquired, as a new classifier brought new resources of hair-splitting pursuit of a supposed type or ideal to bear on the subject. Where, for example, our great ornithologists of the early part of the century, such as Wilson and Audubon, had classed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams |
