Quotes About Learning

If we listen and observe carefully the dying can teach us important things that we need to learn in preparing for the end of our own life's journey.

One balks, then agrees, then balks again only to agree again; that is the way one learns things.

Well, kid, Aahz said, sweeping me with an appraising stare, it looks like we're stuck with each other. The setup isn't ideal, but it's what we've got. Time to bite the bullet and play with the cards we're dealt. You do know what cards are, don't you? Of course, I said, slightly wounded. Good. What's a bullet?

But it's better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

The more you read, the more you calm down.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person.

That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

May, will you please, kindly DIG it, he remembered one of them saying, and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you'll never get time to KNOW.

it, is best served not by mules but by free men. The purpose of abolishing grades and degrees is not to punish mules or to get rid of them but to provide an environment in which that mule can turn into a free man.

grades really cover up failure to teach.

An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results.

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location.

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough? If you take care of it. What do you have to do? Lot's of things. You've been watching me. Will you show me all of them? Sure. Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard. Oh. After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, Dad? What? Will I have the right attitudes? I think so, I say. I don't think that will be any problem at all.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong.

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough? If you take care of it. What do you have to do? Lot's of things. You've been watching me. Will you show me all of them? Sure. Is it hard? Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard.