“Sometimes we find ourselves thinking that since the call comes from the Lord, everything ought to work out smoothly, with every potential obstacle removed. We forget sometimes that life is a schooling provided for our growth and development, and that if every time we went on the Lord s errand, things were to go perfectly well because of the Lord s blessing, we would be deprived of much of our education. {re 1 Nephi 3:7}”
“The First Book Open it. Go ahead, it won t bite. Well. . . maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It s pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it s hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you ll never reach bottom. It s not like it s the end of the world-- just the world as you think you know it.”
“And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame.”
“The more you learn, the more you know, you don’t know enough.”
“~I hope that in this year to come, YOU make mistakes. Because if YOU are making mistakes, then YOU are making NEW things, trying NEW things, learning, living, pushing YOURself, changing YOURself, changing YOUR world. YOU re doing things YOU ve never done before, n MORE importantly, YOU re doing something~”
“Every journey taken always includes the path not taken, the detour through hell, the crossroads of indecision and the long way home.”
“It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.”
“Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.”
“It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.”
“The most influential of all educational factor is the conversation in a child s home.”
“The only way to learn new things is to ask questions and be curious. Find the people who inspire your curiosity because those are the ones you will most learn from.”
“Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other isn t a simple job. It s confusing and this confusion does take time. All of us need time for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to our knowledge.”
“What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
“But failure and success are labels placed upon people’s lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.”
“You should never listen to experts, because in a few years everything they know to be true will be disproven. It s how it s always been, and how it will always be. That s the power of discovery and curiosity.”
“But it s not the pressure of data that gives rise to the understanding. It s, on the contrary, the child s own struggle to make sense of the data”
“I am no scientist. I explore the neighbourhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighbourhood, view the landscape, to discover at least WHERE it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can t learn why.”