This week marks the start of the new school season, and to mark the occasion, the Phrase of the Day has taken on a theme: education and learning. Below are the seven phrases running this week, each accompanied by a short reflection on its meaning.
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." — Nelson Mandela
Mandela's words frame education not as a personal privilege but as a tool for transformation, capable of reshaping societies as well as individual lives. Coming from a man who spent 27 years in prison before leading South Africa's transition from apartheid, the phrase carries the weight of lived experience: knowledge, in his view, was the force that could ultimately overturn injustice.
"The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you." — B.B. King
Where material possessions can be lost, King's phrase points to knowledge as a permanent form of wealth. Spoken by a musician who built his career from humble beginnings, it speaks to learning as something that, once gained, becomes an inseparable part of who a person is.
"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." — Benjamin Franklin
Franklin, a statesman and self-taught polymath, frames education in the language of return on investment, suggesting that unlike financial capital, knowledge only compounds in value over a lifetime and cannot be devalued or lost to circumstance.
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." — Mahatma Gandhi
This phrase holds two opposing instincts in balance: urgency and patience. It urges immediate, purposeful living, while insisting that learning itself should never be rushed or considered complete, treating education as a lifelong pursuit rather than a stage that ends with formal schooling.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." — often attributed to W.B. Yeats
The phrase draws a distinction between two models of learning: one that treats a student as an empty container to be filled with facts, and one that treats them as a source of curiosity to be ignited. The latter, it suggests, produces learners who continue to seek knowledge long after the lesson ends. (Attribution to Yeats is widely repeated but disputed by scholars.)
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." — Plutarch
Echoing a similar idea from antiquity, the ancient Greek philosopher's phrase reinforces that genuine learning is generative, not passive. A mind that is merely filled with information can stagnate, but one that is "kindled" continues to produce new thought and inquiry on its own.
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty." — Henry Ford
Ford's phrase separates age from intellectual vitality, arguing that curiosity, not the passage of years, determines whether a person remains genuinely alive to the world. Read alongside the start of a new school year, it is a reminder that the value of learning extends well beyond the classroom and beyond childhood itself.
A fitting start to the year
Taken together, the week's phrases trace a common thread: that learning is not confined to the classroom, nor to childhood. From Mandela's call to use education as a tool for change to Ford's reminder that curiosity has no age limit, this selection is offered as a small companion to pupils, parents and teachers alike as the new school year begins.
