Marcus Aurelius Quotes

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.

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.

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study.

I believe everything learned in college is an answer to a question that someone has posed. Questions get posed differently and the answers that come back transport us to places we never knew existed.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

You always need to be curious and study.

Women study things in order to figure out how they're connected to other things. I don't know if it's controversial to say that, but that's what I've seen from doing science for a couple of decades.

To learn without thinking is labour in vain, to think without learning is desolation.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

You have to experience life, make observations, and ask questions.

Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot.

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.

Knowledge is the parent of knowledge. He who possesses most of the information of his age will not quietly submit to neglect its current acquisitions, but will go on improving as long as means and opportunities offer; while he who finds himself ignorant of most things, is only too apt to shrink from a labour which becomes Herculean.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

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

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.

Always educate yourself.

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.