'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 rôle whatever through life.'

Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world?

Certainly the true End of visiting Foreign Parts, is to look into their Customs and Policies, and observe in what Particulars they excel or come short of our own; to unlearn some odd Peculiarities in our Manners, and wear off such awkward Stiffnesses and Affectations in our Behaviour, as may possibly have been contracted from constantly associating with one Nation of Men, by a more free, general, and mixed Conversation.

You will have to unlearn those little 'plain dinners' and makeshifts of yours.

The proposition that life may, and does, proceed from that which has no life, then, was held alike by the philosophers, the poets, and the people, of the most enlightened nations, eighteen hundred years ago; and it remained the accepted doctrine of learned and unlearned Europe, through the Middle Ages, down even to the seventeenth century.

To unlearn the evil was the answer, according to Diogenes Laertius, Antisthenes gave, when he was asked what branch of knowledge was most necessary; and we can see what he meant.

Soon she would have unlearnt all the sweet grammar of earth.

And indeed this unlearned Indian, by the mere force of nature, puzzled me with one particular question, more than ever I could have expected.

But since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to eat caviare on principle.

It is this, I think, that makes English public school life so good a discipline, if one unlearns its methods as soon as one has done with it, because it makes men tolerant of criticism and even ridicule; its absence of sentiment makes them tough; its absence of courtesy makes them strong.

We have learned the beauty of the orchid, but surely we have not unlearned the rose; and would you say that orchid or rose is more beautiful than the lily?

The French, after their bold seizure of the island in the name of liberty for the earnest friars, and sealing their brave conquest in the blood of the obstinate Polynesian who had hated to learn a new liturgy and to unlearn his old Protestant songs, feared that the dispersion of the people upon their little plantations, to which they were greatly attached, would make their Frenchifying a long task.

Not yet have I, in sooth, my freedom wrought; Could I my pathway but from magic free, And quite unlearn the spells of sorcery, Stood I, oh nature, man alone 'fore thee, Then were it worth the trouble man to be!

If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.

Leonardo Donato had been in possession of the supreme ducal authority but a few weeks, not long enough to unlearn the tone of command and the quick power of decision which had distinguished him as ambassador, when he had been chosen with the unanimous approval of this august assembly, to conciliate the court of Rome in the hour of the Republic's great emergency.

The chief object of education is to unlearn all the weariness and wickedness of the world and to get back into that state of exhilaration we all instinctively celebrate when we write by preference of children and of boys.

I have unlearned love's very alphabet.

"You cannot make a whole people all at once talk in a different tongue from that which it has been used to talk in: you cannot force it to unlearn the words it has learnt from its fathers, in order to learn a set of newfangled words out of [a grammar or] a dictionary."Ib., i, 650.

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 which they have themselves inculcated.

"Go to!" cried he, "art young and all unlearned as yetheed not my gibes and quirks, 'tis ever so my custom when steel is ringing, and mark me, I do think it a good custom, as apt to put a man off his ward and flurry him in his stroke.