Quotes About Learning

You will never kiss really well, Mr Darcy,' she said, 'unless you practise more. You cannot expect to excel if you do not practise a great deal.

Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

The lesson of daily spiritual practice is not a complicated one and requires no special equipment; we are simply learning to love. That, at the end of the day, is where a spiritual practice takes us: out into the world, living in and loving this world of the spirit, here and now.

The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers. (quoted 2017-12-30 in the Toronto Daily Star)

I don't want to have all the answers, just the right questions.

instead I honestly feel lucky sometimes that I have gotten to feel and experience things that others have to struggle longer and harder to learn.

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

Put in more sobering terms, only one-third of twenty-first-century American children now read with sufficient understanding and speed at the exact age when their future learning depends on it. The fourth grade represents a Maginot Line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn. More disturbing altogether, close to half

inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain's huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer

Whatever our age, we can be changed by the lives of others if we learn to connect the whole of the reading circuit with our moral imagination.

For reasons we've explored, children struggling to read aren't going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical in so many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are trained to use a toolbox of principals that they can apply to different types of children.

In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

Como santo Tomás de Aquino, concibo el desacuerdo como el lugar donde «el hierro con hierro se afila».