Quotes About Learning

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

The future is in the past.

poverty makes experiences

They found it difficult to accept that their grasp was a little short. But

that wealth leads to the rise of education

only suckers wait for answers; questions are not made for answers):

Trial and error means trying a lot.

American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment.

Clearly you cannot manufacture more information than the past can deliver; if you buy one hundred copies of The New York Times, I am not too certain that it would help you gain incremental knowledge of the future. We just don't know how much information there is in the past.

You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don't understand.

We certainly know a lot, but we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than we actually do, enough of that little bit to occasionally get into serious trouble.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.

I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity.

Who is this book written for?

those who cannot learn from experience, or don't mind taking risks they don't understand, may kill many.

regardless of their levels of sophistication and learning.

I want to be broadly right rather than precisely wrong.

people don't learn so much from their—and other people's—mistakes; rather it is the system that learns by selecting those less prone to a certain class of mistakes and eliminating others.

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).

that classroom education does not lead to wealth as much as it comes from wealth