Liberal Arts Education Quotes

• I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world

  Steve Case

  Art, Thinking, Important

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• The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

  Albert Einstein

  Memorable, College, Thinking

  "Einstein: His Life and Times". Book by Philipp Frank (p. 185), 1947.

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• It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Art, Book

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.100, Princeton University Press

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• The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats and dogs.

  Marva Collins

  Dog, Art, Cat

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• My personal advice is to go to school first and get a liberal arts education, and then if you want to pursue acting, go to graduate school.

  Jillian Bach

  Inspirational, Funny, Graduation

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• The basic purpose of a liberal arts education is to liberate the human being to exercise his or her potential to the fullest.

  Barbara M. White

  Education, Art, Exercise

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• I think the more you have a generalist perspective, I think sometimes the more you can kind of see through the forest and the trees. And when it gets a little bit cloudy, you know, have some sense of, "Well, maybe this might happen or maybe that might happen." So I really am a big believer in liberal arts education. I think it's better - particularly in these kind of uncertain times - to know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to being expert in one thing.

  Steve Case

  Education, Art, Thinking

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• For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life.

  Derek Bok

  Art, College, May

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• What is desperately needed... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.

  Felix Rohatyn

  Art, Skepticism, Needed

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• When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice... As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative... If you spill your milk you're left with a glass which is either half empty or half full... You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

  Margaret Atwood

  Inspirational, Graduation, Art

  "Attitude". Margaret Atwood's commencement address at the University of Toronto, Canada, www.humanity.org. June 14, 1983.

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• This is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

  David Foster

  Art, Real, Bullshit

  "David Foster Wallace's Legendary Graduation Speech Is Now An Awesome Short Film". "This Is Water" Speech at Kenyon College, www.businessinsider.com. 2005.

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• I got a liberal arts education just because I felt like I should to keep my parents happy, but it was for them. If it was up to me, I would've just moved to New York.

  Kathryn Hahn

  Art, New York, Parent

  "The Hilarious Hank Azaria". Interview with Kathryn Hahn, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 28, 2014.

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• Unless you took courses in architecture, engineering, or pre-med, the rest of your liberal arts education hardly prepares you for life as the business warrior and champion you envision yourself to be.

  Gene Simmons

  Inspirational, Art, Warrior

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• When I finished high school, I was 16, and in Argentina you have to choose a career right after high school. There is no such thing as a liberal arts education.

  Cesar Pelli

  Art, School, Careers

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• Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed.

  Bell Hooks

  Art, Believe, Reading

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• I wasnt using college as a stepping stone to law school or some other career. I just wanted a liberal-arts education.

  Charlie Trotter

  Art, School, College

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