Quotes About Learning

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and as misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly.

You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all.

These kids were smart, they were enthusiastic, and they were young enough so that the schools hadn't destroyed all their interest in learning. They could still actually use their brains, which in Thorne's view was a sure sign they hadn't yet completed a formal education.

If you [don't] know history, then [you don't] know anything. You [are] a leaf that [doesn't] know it [is] part of a tree.

you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.

She had discovered long ago that you could use a computer without understanding how it worked. Just as you could use an automobile, vacuum cleaner - or your own brain.

but one never really understood life in the New World until confronted with the actual rude experience.

if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds—and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

Young Johnson Joins the Field Trip West

Fearlessness in the face of your own ineptitude is a useful tool to have.

I'm just a child who's learned to impersonate an adult.

One error at the beginning is quite likely just that.

The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one's energies on some problem in history or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind -- these are right and proper ideals for life.

we learn best by placing our 'confidence in men and women whose examples invite us to love what they love'(Robert Wilken).

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

Life is what a business is about, and life is what this work is about. Coming to grips with oneself, in the face of an incredibly complex world that can teach us if we're open to learn.

The third says that the business is a place where everything we know how to do is tested by what we don't know how to do, and that the conflict between the two is what creates growth, what creates meaning.