Lobsang Tenzin Quotes

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

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

The brainy class is made up of individuals who think for themselves and beyond formal education are continuous learners who tend to be self-taught.

I never stop reading. I read everything, and I read every day. If you never read anything, be curious. Curiosity is the true foundation of education, reading things that we've factually already agreed on, and I love reading books. With that said, it's more important that you ask the question 'why.'

Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

Beware of the person of one book.

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 like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

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.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

Only a well-rounded intellect, a spirit nourished in the eternal sources of intelligence and culture, of justice and wisdom, is a safeguard against both indifference and skepticism.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew. To say you've got to inquire, you've got to be testing your knowledge all the time in order to be more effective in what you're doing.

If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

The curiosity of the human mind is essential if you want citizens who think rather than accept the first nonsense they come to.

When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.