Quotes about Learning

Coming from an unsuccessful background, I had developed deep feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. I had fallen into the mental trap of assuming that people who were doing better than me were actually better than me. What I learned was that this was not necessarily true. They were just doing things differently, and what they had learned to do, within reason, I could learn as well.

To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must learn and practice qualities and skills that you have never had before.

Practice is the key to mastering any skill.

The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried.

Difficulties come not to obstruct, but to instruct.

I tell Ki that I'm learning about words and stories to help our family. He says he's protecting our family with his knife. Who is right? Which is best, protecting with words or with his knife? She is instant, certain, and solemn, and there is no misunderstanding her meaning. Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil with your knife. Tell you husband, Ki, that he is right.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.

If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort?

It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.