We are more than half of what we are by imitation. The great point is to choose good models and to study them with care.

The trick is to keep learning. If you stop learning, other people will pass you by. Temperament alone won't do it — you have to keep learning, because the world keeps changing, and you have to keep up with it and even get ahead of it.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

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.

The best thing for your own mind is to be exposed relentlessly to smart people who disagree with you.

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. If you're unwilling to make mistakes, you're unwilling to try anything new, and you'll never learn.

The best way to get smart is to try to be a little smarter than you were the day before. And the way to do that is to recognize how much you don't know.

The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument, and it requires to be tuned up and put in order before it can produce harmonious results.

The best way to get smart is to try to be a little smarter than you were the day before—and to do that, you have to know what you don't know.

We do not know what we may be able to do until we try, and we can never be certain beforehand that an experience is worth having until we have had it.

longreads.com

What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?

part of the magic of how kids learn is that they have less knowledge of what they're going to experience and fewer expectations about what's going to be relevant. They don't have that adult filter of strategically extracting things from their experience, and so they retain a lot of unexpected details that adults would find irrelevant. That allows them to be creative in ways that adults are not creative.

The mind, once stretched by a new experience, never returns to its original dimensions.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. And the worst thing you can do to a talented person is to prevent them from starting fires.

The mind of man is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

A man may take to drink on account of trouble, but he would be none the better for the drinking; whereas, if he takes to reading, he will become wise.

The mind, once expanded by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

The best thing you can do is to be a learning machine. You should go out of your way to try to be wrong and to seek disconfirming evidence.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are apathetic to others, until education and experience have taught it to attend to every thing that may be of consequence.

The mind does not work by starting from universal principles and deducing particular applications. It works the other way, by grasping the concrete particular and then working up to general ideas.

The best investment you can make is in yourself. But most people won't because it requires delayed gratification—you must become a student of your own ignorance.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not destroy the mind of the pupil at all. When one considers the usual methods of teaching, this is indeed extraordinary. Yet it does happen, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten it happens by accident.

The best thing a human can do is to help another human being know more. It's even better than making money.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

honest-broker.com

My 24 Rules for Reading

I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. But here's the strange thing. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way.

honest-broker.com

My 24 Rules for Reading

I decided at age 13 that I would read books to attain wisdom—and I've kept it up ever since. Maybe that sounds absurd when mentioned so baldly. So go ahead and laugh if you want. But here's the strange thing. I got all those other benefits—job skills, entertainment, etc.—along the way.