William James Quotes

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience.

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

I'm like the kid that crams for tests and never remembers anything.

In school, many of us procrastinate and then successfully cram for tests. We get the grades and degrees we need to get the jobs we want, even if we fail to get a good general education.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

I can read a four-page scene once and have it memorized. It's a skill you learn in school: disposable cramming.

Teach and practice, practice and teach - that is all we have; that is all we are good for; that is all we ever ought to do.

No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory

I was the guy that would cram for everything, so I guess I was a bit of a slacker. I was a procrastinator. I spent a lot of all-nighters getting ready for tests.

The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.

Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

Gotta start teaching the children that they can be just what they want to be, there's much more to life than poverty.

Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system.

You know, I want to teach, but I don’t want to read?

Most people...are put off science because maths is the gateway and they can't handle it. What we should be teaching is operational maths because, in general, the maths we need to carry out science is pretty straightforward.

I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.

One of the skills of a journalist, though, is to find people who can teach him what he needs to know. So instead of taking courses, I've been very lucky in that I found teachers - scientists, especially - who were willing to teach me what I needed to know, whether it was about genetically modified crops or how photosynthesis works, and so on. I just find my teachers and don't have to pay for my education.