Howard Gardner Quotes

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Complex things, if you don't understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

I am a firm believer that if you can explain it to a kid, you're on the right track.

Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of its causes the least to take on the magnitude.

Sometimes it's easier to understand things than it is to figure them out

If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

The key to all knowledge comes in words of just one syllable, apparently.... There's only the last page left to write on. I'll fill it with words of just one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.

You have to really know what you're saying.

Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Cliches are what make you understand something.

To be honest everything goes over my head a bit.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.