“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.”
“It is a state of mind, a learning of the oneness of things, an appreciation for fundamental insights known in Eastern philosophy and religion as simply the Way [or Tao]. For Boyd, the Way is not an end but a process, a journey…The connections, the insights that flow from examining the world in different ways, from different perspectives, from routinely examining the opposite proposition, were what were important. The key is mental agility”
“Don’t despise any experience. With every experience, you increase in knowledge and wisdom.”
“I will wholeheartedly perform my holy duties.”
“We place this huge burden on answers to function as finish lines, when they more naturally perform as milestones. We fool ourselves if we believe that answers are the proper response to questions, when the formal acknowledgment of a question is to embrace its invitation to enter into the journey of learning.”
“Read good books to improve your life.”
“If you want to go to places worth going, you have to be open to personal growth. No matter how much your job pays you, if it doesn’t offer you the opportunity to grow, your efforts would only go to waste. There are really just some things that money can’t buy. Never stop learning!”
“Most complain about dried up lawns; others envy a neighbor s green lawn, but winners learn from all lawns while cultivating their own.”
“If I have nothing but a room full of books, it is enough for me to survive life.”