Joyce Grenfell Quotes

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.

On the basis of the familiar experience that that which is learned with difficulty is better retained, it would have been safe to prophesy such an effect from the greater number of repetitions.

Mind mapping is a technique based on memory and creativity and comprehension and understanding, so when the student or a child uses the mind map, they are using their brain in the way their brain was designed to be used, and so the mind helps them in all learning and cognitive skills. It simply helps them in what the brain does naturally.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

The older you get, the better you get, because you've seen more. You don't necessarily have to go through a lot, but you have to witness it in order to recreate it.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

You learn a lot from kids.

I've had my nose in a book my whole life. I never thought it would be useful, but it is now. What's really nice is that I don't have a photographic memory, so words get blurred, thoughts get mixed up, and they come out as something new.

I think you never leave what you learn.

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

I learned to observe the world around me, and to note what I saw

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, "I learned so much today," that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It's only 100 years old.

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

People learn more from observation that they do from conversation.

When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, "If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don't just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people's shoes. Because all of them are part of filmmaking." So I thought, perfect! That's a good job for me.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

The best thing as an actor, the best tool you have is your imagination. That you kind of take things that have happened, and then go and expand on them. However small it is, you use your imagination to create what that reality is. There's something kind of fun when you're not old enough to do anything, driving a car, getting into a bar, drinking, going to a party you don't belong to, something when you're young in that innocent way.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

Observe, Remember, Compare.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.