Quotes About Learning

We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the

So we can learn a lot from data—but not as much as we expect. Sometimes a lot of data can be meaningless; at other times one single piece of information can be very meaningful. It

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone

Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer…

Learning from the Mistakes of Others

ideas do not truly sink in when emotions come into play;

since mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes.

One day in the 1980s I had dinner with a famous speculator, a hugely successful man. He muttered the hyperbole that hit home: "much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

repeated serial exposure.

in spite of having spent some time in libraries I feel that I am truly an amateur in the subject matter).

that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided

Mother Nature knows more than he will ever know, not the other way around.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.

Corollary to Moore's Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half.*

The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and "learning," not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)—a point also made by Alison Wolf.

it does not come naturally to me.*

He paid no price for the mistake.

users of these machines gain no strength beyond an initial phase.

We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before.