Marquis de Condorcet Quotes

Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

Thinking is not enough. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any... thing.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

Knowledge, learning, is an eternal thing.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

It is only through reading that one can understand how people are smarter than you and what they have left behind for you.

I would say I have become a lot smarter in the way I understand things.

Education, information and knowledge are all one.

A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

It is better to have wisdom without learning than learning without wisdom.

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.

Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.

Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas.

A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it."

He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.

Books are the training weights of the mind.

All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

Perception of ideas, rather than the storing of them, should be the aim of education.

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.