Quotes About Learning

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is co-ordinated and used. Still, the amount of information to which we have accessed is one index of our intelligence.

The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects.

Hay preguntas ingenuas, preguntas tediosas, preguntas malformuladas, preguntas planteadas con una inadecuada autocrítica. Pero toda pregunta es un clamor por entender el mundo. No hay preguntas estúpidas.

If we teach only the findings and products of science – no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be – without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Our passion for learning is our tool for survival.

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge.

Perhaps for the first time in any medium, the person teaching you science—Carl Sagan—cared about the tangled mental roadways that can rob a person of rational thought.

For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

Toda nuestra ciencia, comparada con la realidad, es primitiva e infantil… y sin embargo es lo más preciado que tenemos. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

I know personally, both from having science explained to me and from my attempts to explain it to others, how gratifying it is when we get it, when obscure terms suddenly take on meaning, when we grasp what all the fuss is about, when deep wonders are revealed.

This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities.

I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright.

Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies in the laboratory.

what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.

At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, "out of a curiosity to see what there was in it." He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop.

O método da ciência, por mais enfadonho e ranzinza que pareça, é muito mais importante do que as descobertas dela.

She consented to rote memorization, but knew that it was at best the hollow shell of an education. She did the minimum work necessary to do well in her courses, and pursued other matters.