learning

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.

Jargon is the dark matter of academia—it occupies space, adds weight, but lets no light through. [...] To explain something plainly is not to cheapen it; it is to grant the listener entry into the idea.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

Teach in order to learn.

To pursue learning is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.

This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who … told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. … My answer to him was, ‘John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.’ The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don’t think that’s so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts.

The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know.

It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.