mike's web log/quotes

advice advice computers editing education funny general language laws music politics reading religion science sports technology working writing (all)

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Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
— Samuel Johnson general | education

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.
— Sam Levenson advice | funny | education

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
— Albert Einstein writing | general | education

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
— Confucius advice | general | education

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
— Mark Twain advice | funny | education

I write books to find out about things.
— Rebecca West writing | education

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
— Mullah Nasrudin education | general

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
— Peter DeVries education | general | funny

People studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.
— Paul Graham education | writing

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
— Theodore Roosevelt education | general

Getting lost can do wonders in helping one figure out how things actually work.
— Jenny Berger education | general | advice

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
— Charles Darwin education | general

Look, you don't get good at writing by deleting adjectives. Writing is difficult and demanding; you can learn to get moderately good at it through decades of practice writing millions of words and critiquing what you've written or having others critique it.
— Geoffrey Pullum writing | education

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.
— Epictetus advice | education

This process of digging up the details and learning how things work leads down many side streets and to many dead ends, but is fundamental (I think) to understanding something new. Many times in my books I have set out to write how something works, thinking I know how it works, only to write some test programs that lead me to things that I never knew. I try to convey some of these missteps in my books, as I think seeing the wrong solution to a problem (and understanding why it is wrong) is often as informative as seeing the correct solution.
— W. Richard Stevens writing | computers | education

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
— Thomas Szasz advice | education

When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time.
— Paul Graham advice | general | education

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
— Lord Byron advice | general | education

Try a thing you haven't done three times.
Once, to get over the fear of doing it.
Twice, to learn how to do it.
And the third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.
— Robert Evans advice | education

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
— Steven Wright funny | general | education

Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected.
— Sophocles advice | education

The real reason I want to go to a University—and the reason, when you get right down to it, everybody else seems to be interested in as well—is the people. I want to go to a place filled with people like me, but smarter; a place where you can't help but learn.
— Aaron Swartz general | advice | education

As someone who observed a graduate department of English from the inside for six years, I can assure you that any correlation between the award of a Ph.D. and actual erudition is often coincidental.
— John McIntyre general | funny | education

One of the best things about teaching undergraduates is how much you learn.
— Mark Liberman general | education

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
— Frank Herbert general | education

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
— George Washington general | advice | politics | education

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
— Isaac Asimov general | education

The more I learn from my teachers and mentors, the deeper I am in debt for all they have taught to me.
— Rajesh Setty general | education

The main thing you don't learn with a CS degree is how to develop software, although you will probably build up certain muscles in your brain that may help you later if you decide that developing software is what you want to do.
— Joel Spolsky computers | education

It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.
— Frank Herbert general | education

Teacher: a capacity for enthusiasm for the obvious.
— Theodore Roethke general | funny | education

Learning and mastery are not states you get to by accreting years of service. You learn by doing, so go do something.
— Kent Sharkey advice | education

My opinion after 40-odd (and some of them were very odd) years of teaching is that good writing can't be taught, though it can be learned.
— John Lawler writing | education

When the Sun-Times appointed me film critic, I hadn't taken a single film course. One of the reasons I started teaching was to teach myself.
— Roger Ebert general | education

One obvious problem with the whole “liberal academy” argument is that free inquiry and open consideration of diverse viewpoints is itself a liberal value - and not a conservative one, since what's conserved is a predetermined truth. So the university itself would be impossible on conservative grounds.
— Carl Dyke politics | education

The skills proper to a college education are critical thinking, rigorous interpretation, and sensitivity to perspectives, alternatives and complexities. Such skills don't pay off immediately and they're in a sense value-neutral, but they're what we need to become more thoughtful, reflective, effective, and actively moral people in the longer run.
— Carl Dyke education | general

What I began to realize was that in economics we are always making silly assumptions; it's just that some of them have been made so often that they come to seem natural. And so one should not reject a model as silly until one sees where its assumptions lead.
— Paul Krugman education | general

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life—save only this—that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.
— John Alexander Smith education

Learning, be it chemistry, physics, or biology, is not a spectator sport. A student doesn't learn sitting on the aisle in a lecture room watching a spectacular performance by a star lecturer.
— Robert Morrison education

Learning anything is 10% material and 90% being excited to learn.
— Daniel Bourke education

Convince me that homeschooling is a good thing for society, and not just about information control, distrust of authority and reinforcement of insularity.
— "Occam's Battleaxe" education | religion | politics