Walter Isaacson Quotes

It is only from the people I've had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of 'Moulin Rouge,' for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers - quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

Rather than knowing more, I think I've got more open-minded.

When you're out in the field and spending time in these different places around the world, humility is one of the most important assets that will serve you well.

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.

Tell me, O wise man, how hast thou come to know so astonishingly much? By never being ashamed to ask of those that knew!

A certain degree of intellectual humility is a good thing.

I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.

We learn nothing by being right.

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Ask dumb questions and listen quietly for the answers. That's a wisdom stair climber.

If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.

So curiosity, I think, is a really important aspect of staying young or youthful.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Humility is really important because it keeps you fresh and new.

And I like asking questions, to keep learning; people with big egos might not want to look unsure.

I guess confidence is the only thing that I take from project to project, but I'm always open to learning everybody's style - the director, the actor I'm working with.

I'm open for possibilities. I'm open for choices. I always welcome new ideas. I'm always eager to learn. I'm never going to close my mind from learning.

I'm considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life.

You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

Don't pretend to know everything. I've been blessed to work with a lot of veteran actors, and I soak up lessons from them like a sponge.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.