Quotes About Learning

After all, this is how you learned how to walk. You didn't just jump up from your crib one day and waltz gracefully across the room. You stumbled and fell on your face and got up and tried again. At what age are you suddenly expected to know everything and never make any more mistakes? If you can love and respect yourself in failure, worlds of adventure and new experiences will open up before you, and your fears will vanish.

Knowing too much about a subject can make us overly cautious. Having a lot of conventional wisdom may make us doubt our own hunches and intuition because we're more likely to think that any seemingly good ideas that pop into our heads are wrong if they don't square with what we've previously learned.

But after children leave their parents' arms, school is still the necessary place for knowledge and soul to spring into life and good teachers are still the instigators of that miracle.

Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

objective knowledge is indeed possible: it comes from within! It begins as conjecture, and is then corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our 'wall'.

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.' By

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This

Using our explanations, we 'see' right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people's behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That

The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

This is what we can achieve when, as Feynman said, we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?

Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one's own and others'.

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions.

A theory may be superseded by a new theory which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. That is what happened when Nicolaus Copernicus's theory of the Earth travelling round the Sun superseded the complex Ptolemaic system which had placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.

Richard Feynman said, 'Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

I think patience is a skill and I wish I had it.

There are certain things I learned when I first started learning about acting, to try and place the character physically and emotionally. And the way you place them emotionally is often with humor.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.