Garth Nix Quotes

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information, which can then be used in my work, but also just as a human being.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I'm not sure that the last couple of generations - Generation X and Generation Next, or whatever you want to call them - even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

I'm used to being surrounded by really smart 22-year-old students who have no problem saying that something I suggested is not a very good idea.

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don't seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn't have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that, by the time they leave school, every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it