Hugh of St. Victor, Learn gladly from everyone

From Didascalicon

    Zeal for inquiry pertains to exercise, in which the student needs encouragement more than instruction. For he who will diligently examine what the ancients achieved because of their love of wisdom, and what monuments of their power they left to be remembered by posterity, will see how inferior is his own diligence. Some spurned honours, others threw away riches, some rejoiced when they received injuries, others scorned punishments, others, abandoning the society of men and penetrating the inmost recesses and secret places of the desert, dedicated themselves solely to philosophy, in order that they might have leisure for contemplating it more freely, because they did not subject their minds to any of those desires which are wont to obstruct the path of virtue. The philosopher Parmenides is said to have sat for fifteen years on a rock in Egypt, and Prometheus is remembered because of his excessive attention to meditation while he was exposed to the vultures on Mount Caucasus. For they knew that the true good is not concealed in the opinion of men, but in a pure conscience, and that those are not really men who, clinging to transitory things, do not recognize their own good. The ancients knew also how much they differed from the others in mind and in intelligence; the very remoteness of their dwellings shows that one habitation may not hold those who are not associated in the same purpose. A certain man once said to a philosopher, "Don't you see how men mock you?" And the philosopher answered, "They mock me and the asses deride them." Think, if you can, how much he valued being praised by those whose scorn he did not fear. Again, we read of another that, after the study of all disciplines and after reaching the heights of the arts, he descended to the potter's trade. And of still another that his disciples loaded their master with praises, and did not fail to boast of his skill as a shoemaker. I would desire such diligence, then, to be in our students, that in them wisdom should never grow old. (...) Almost all virtues of the body change in the old, and while wisdom alone increases, the others decline. For in the old age of those who furnish their youth with honourable arts, they become more learned, more practised, wiser in the course of time, and reap the sweetest fruits of earlier studies. Whence also it is said that after that wise man of Greece, Themistocles, had lived one hundred and seven years, he saw that he was about to die, and said that he grieved because he had to abandon life just when he had begun to be wise. Plato died after eighty-one a years, and Socrates filled ninety-nine years with teaching and writing and painful labour. I say nothing of the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno ..., who flourished for a long time in the studies of wisdom.

    I come now to the poets, Homer, Hesiod, Simonides ..., who, when they were very old, sang their swan songs, I know not what, but sweeter than ever at the approach of death. When Sophocles, at a very great age and because of his neglect of family affairs was accused by his own family of madness, he recited to the judge that tale of Oedipus which he had written earlier, and gave so great an example of wisdom in his broken old age, that he converted the severity of his judges into acclamation of his performance. Nor is it to be wondered at that when Cato the Censor, the most eloquent of the Romans, took up the study of Greek as an old man, he was not ashamed, nor did he despair. Certainly Homer tells us that sweeter discourse flowed from the tongue of Nestor when he was an old and decrepit man. Behold, then, how much those men loved wisdom whom not even infirm old age could keep from its pursuit.

    Related:  Cicero, I have spared no pains to make myself master of the Greek language and learning,  Augustine, Socrates fought foolishness, Plato perfected philosophy,  Basil the Great, Education is necessary, Gregory Theologian, Education is the highest good,  Papatsonis, In Rising Sound,  Kant, We need consistency,  Russell Lowell, Fecundating minds,  Erasmus, Folly's lineage, education and companions,  Plato: Who is a philosopher? - Searching for the things' reason - Out of the cave - Wisdom.

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greeks-us/hugh-victor_philosophy.asp?pg=3