Quotes About Learning

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

Each new generation, he thought, fails to learn from the one before.

What is effective for increasing motivation and the willingness to take on challenges is focusing praise on the child's effort, on what the child has done, not on an ability he can't control (such as intelligence) or on the final result (which he may not easily be able to replicate).

Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. ... Reading is bliss.

Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage, talking to the audience, looking at them and smiling, that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now, but there are still moments of awkwardness.

I don't think I'm a great songwriter, but I think I've learned a lot about it, and I don't think there's any one way to do it. I don't think I can control it at all. I can just kind of hope that it happens.

I believe that Ashby's brilliant idea of the unpurposeful random mechanism which seeks for its own purpose through a process of learning is not only one of the great philosophical contributions of the present day, but will lead to highly useful technical developments in the task of automatization. Not only can we build purpose into machines, but in an overwhelming majority of cases a machine designed to avoid certain pitfalls of breakdown will look for purposes which it can fulfill.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

The physiological condition for memory and hence for learning seems to be a certain continuity of organization, which allows the alterations produced by outer sense impressions to be retained as more or less permanent changes of structure or function . Metamorphosis is too radical to leave much lasting record of these changes. It is indeed hard to conceive of a memory of any precision which can survive this process of radical internal reconstruction.

Learning, like more primitive forms of feedback, is a process which reads differently forward and backward in time. The whole conception of the apparently purposive organism, whether it is mechanical, biological, or social, is that of an arrow with a particular direction in the stream of time rather than that of a line segment facing both ways which we may regard as going in either direction.

When I first heard about statistics in 1951, I firmly believed it to be the best technique around, and it took me 26 years to be completely free of its spell.

learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn. Latin Proverb

We all love to discover for ourselves the causes of problems.  When we do discover for ourselves our energy really moves inside us.  When we are told the answers we might learn a little, but it is nothing like the magic of discovering things through our own questions.

You can learn too much from experience.  A cat that sits on a hot stove will not sit on a hot stove again but unfortunately the cat will not sit on a cold one either."  - Mark Twain

Become a student of change. It is the only thing that will remain constant." - Anthony J. D'Angelo

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration—studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing—are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. (254)

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person's ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue.