Charlie Munger Quotes

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

Without theory we can only copy.

It's better to understand something than to memorize something.

There is no knowledge without theory.

Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

Perception of ideas, rather than the storing of them, should be the aim of education.

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Any time we are answer-driven rather than idea driven, we have lost the true meaning of education.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

The inexplicable happens all the time. It makes more sense to simply accept things we observe but cannot understand. It is really more scientific to keep an open mind. Until we can understand and explain the things we now label miracles, let us accept them and try to create more of them.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

I don't like that sort of school... where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged... where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines.

I have a natural curiosity about things, in general. I'm constantly trying to find out how things work and how I can put them back together again, and why they work that way. The natural world is all around us.

If you're studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.