Rohinton Mistry Quotes

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

You want to learn everything that you possibly can, chew it, digest it, and take it for what it is, and then move on.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

I've been blessed with a good head on my shoulders and quite a good ability of discernment. I can see through people.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

I think I have good judgment.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

I believe that you can always learn from observation.

We cannot create observers by saying 'observe', but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.

I believe that the development of language - of naming, categorization, conceptualization - destroys our ability to see as we age.

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can't even answer the simplest questions.

I'm not deceived by people, because I don't pay attention to people.

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.

People are born with the ability to make judgments. And they can't help but use the information they have to divine something about the world they're in. Making categorical judgments, in large, helps our society.

Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

Every man needs a blind eye and a deaf ear, so when people applaud, you'll only hear half of it, and when people salute, you'll only see part of it. Believe only half the praise and half the criticism.

One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

Intellect is the ability to avoid belaboring the obvious.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand