Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

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

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

I can't talk about anything or write about anything if I don't understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

I do think observing is important in learning.

The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

I like to read and understand.

Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it.

It's better to understand something than to memorize something.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.

The more one knows, the more one comprehends, the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.

Everyone praises his heart, none dare praise their understanding.

He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Reading is more important than writing.

In reference to right answers - Knowing is a process, not a product.

We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.