Quotes About Learning

Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics.

Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure out the truth

It depends on what you think is the purpose of education. Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think."40

The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50

Those who can, do; those who do and understand, teach.

Forget about the 10,000-hour rule you've heard so much about. It's a red herring. What's important is not the hours you've practiced, but the kind of practice in your hours. Focus on the tree, not the forest.

A single conversation with a wise person is worth a month's study of books.

Those with a fixed mindset tend to learn things in a superficial way, just enough to prove they can do it. That's bad enough, but it gets worse. When people

There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

On the other hand, those with a growth mindset believe that intelligence is something that can be grown. Effort, work, and challenges are what make intelligence grow and flower and bear juicy fruit. People with a growth mindset aren't as attached to demonstrating their intelligence because they know intelligence can be increased, and so intelligence isn't a fundamental, unvarying aspect of their sense of self. Notice I said, "aren't as attached.

When great musicians practice, they go slowly enough that errors are avoided. When an error does crop up, expert practicers fix those errors immediately. That's the strategy: fixing a mistake immediately. Anybody can do it, and anybody who adopts that strategy will get better faster than those who don't.

Musical ability doesn't come from either the chicken or the embryo, it's the chicken and the embryo. Talent isn't some mysterious natural ability. Talent is practice in disguise.

Beginners often can't perceive errors unless they're big ones, massive clams that cause the musical endeavor to come crashing to a halt. At this point, beginning practicers usually compound the error by returning to the top of the tune for another attempt, instead of fixing the error immediately, like experts do.

If you are irritated by every rub, how can you be polished?

If you're not engaged and active in a learning situation, you probably won't get much out of it, just as Serge's example illustrates. Get the most out of your practice by coming to lessons—or any learning situation—with specific goals in mind. One of the most powerful things you can learn from a teacher is how to practice. Some teachers

Practicing slowly (combined with active listening) is the first concrete practice technique I've

Taking practice apart for analysis kills something that is a dynamic, variable, and highly complex personal endeavor.

Goals are in a near-constant state of revision, especially the shorter-term goals, because as you come up against the reality of learning something, you have to adapt to adjust to that reality.

It's exciting how much there is to learn; several lifetime's worth, really.

Experts who accumulated 10,000 hours of practice weren't trying to accumulate those hours; their focus was elsewhere, on the task at hand.

What is the true cost of a man's mistakes?

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.

that's the mark of an intellectual, in my view, becoming cognizant of one's own insignificance in relation to the accumulated mass of human knowledge.