John Desmond Bernal Quotes

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

You learn out of bitter experience, trial and error. Life teaches you that. As sincere as you all are, you can't learn it all in school.

To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.

I now know that I learn by solving problems as they arise. Rarely do we learn significant lessons, or significantly improve, any other way.

Science class is traditionally taught as science history class - you learn all these facts that someone else discovered, which you need to know, but that's not really an inspiring way to learn science.

I always believe that a person can learn so much by just jumping into something and trying to do it rather than having someone else teach you everything.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

The only way you learn is by doing. You learn through deed, so that's kind of my aspiration for the time being.

Experience is the only teacher we have. We may talk and reason all our lives, but we shall not understand a word of truth until we experience it ourselves.

Learning is not watching a video, learning is taking action and seeing what happens.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.

I find it best to dive right in and learn the hard way.

The love of experiment was very strong in him [Charles Darwin], and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday.

Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.

I think we all learn by doing rather than thinking about doing.

Learning is an active process. We learn by doing.. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.

Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.

There's nothing that can teach you more than experience.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Only ... from personal experience [can a man] take the necessary measures without a preliminary process of trial and error.