Benjamin Franklin Quotes

A man, groundly learned already, may take much profit himself in using by epitome to draw other men’s works, for his own memory sake, into short room.

I definitely take notes, but I feel like sometimes if I take too many notes, it kind of bogs down my mind a little bit. So, I just write down stuff that I need to remember for the game.

We never read without profit if with the pen or pencil in our hand we mark such ideas as strike us by their novelty, or correct those we already possess.

Be a collector of good ideas, but don't trust your memory. The best collecting place for all of the ideas and information that comes your way is your journal.

Nothing remains intact without effort. Repetition of formulas does not assure the transmission of thought. It is not safe to entrust a doctrinal treasure to the passivity of memory. Intelligence must play a part in its conservation, rediscovering it, so to speak, in the process.

Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

Don't read a book and be a follower; read a book and be a student.

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information?

A book is a story, even if it's non-fiction, and once I've read it, I have the story with me inside my head always.

Learning is an active process. We learn by doing.. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.

I’m skeptical of passive learning. If you don’t write down what you’re hearing and learning, what the odds you remember it?

If there is anything that I think I might use later, I underline it.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

Nulla (enim) res tantum ad dicendum proficit, quantum scriptio Nothing so much assists learning as writing down what we wish to remember.

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.

As for my memory, I have a particularly good one. I never keep any record of my investigations or experiments. My memory files all these things away conveniently and reliably. I should say, though, that I didn’t cumber it up with a lot of useless matter.