Michael Masser Quotes

Memory and creativity are essential to education, but if you teach memory incorrectly, it is a total waste of time, and it will inhibit learning.

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

I'm not a big believer in doing too much research - I think you can get lost in it. You can get constrained by it, which I think is a mistake. But if you've done your homework, the audience feels it.

I've got research, I have my own life experience I can apply, and I have my imagination.

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

Children are trained to think linearly instead of imaginatively; they are taught to read slowly and carefully, and are discouraged from daydreaming. They are trained to reduce the use and capacity of their brain.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

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.

The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.

Research has been called good business, a necessity, a gamble, a game. It is none of these - it's a state of mind.

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.

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.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

I know how to think outside of the box and be creative.

I give people ideas on how to solve intractable problems.

I like my mind being stimulated. I like discovering new concepts.

Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned.

I have lots of ideas. Trouble is, most of them suck.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.