Tony Buzan Quotes

The less unnecessary effort you put into learning, the more successful you'll be . . . Doing the wrong thing with more intensity rarely improves the situation.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

Long is the road to learning by precepts, but short and successful by examples.

I really had no religious upbringing, which is unusual. But I think it saved me, because when I found the theory that I wanted to follow, I did not have anything to unlearn.

A successful day for me is when I teach people something. They become enlightened by an idea and learn how to think about it, so that later on when someone says, "Tell me about x, y, z," they don't have to say, "I know this because Tyson told me." No, they'll say, "Here's why it's true because I know and understand it."

I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible.

I think to be successful at anything you have to put in a hell of a lot of effort. Pick your battles. I picked music, put in a lot of effort, and it's worked.

The great art to learn much is to undertake a little at a time.

The best results are achieved by using the right amount of effort in the right place at the right time. And this right amount is usually less than we think we need.

The chief art of learning is to attempt but a little at a time.

I think I can straighten out our mess in education.

Education! Is it education to teach the young that their chances of happiness depend on being richer than their neighbors? Yet that is what it all tends to. Get on! - be successful!

Sometimes you get lucky - you don't put much work in and you're successful anyway. But over the course of time, if you really want to shape your path, I think it's about the quality of the time you put in.

One of my big, big strengths I think early on in my career was that I could learn very quickly. You wouldn't have to tell me the things 10 times or 50 times until I would understand them. You would only have to tell me two or three times.

I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

It's especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you're so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.

Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?

Education is the thing. This black-white bit - I don't deal with people that way. I deal with it as if you are another individual. If you do something that perturbs me or aggravates me, I do not think you've done it because I'm black.

A true teacher doesn't teach you to think like him, but to think without him.

The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder. If you are on the fifth step of a ladder and think that you are very high, there is no hope for you to climb to the sixth.