Terence Tao Quotes

I got a lot of whoopings back in the day. I was a very curious kid.

I was a bum at school. I never liked learning, and stupid ideas used to come to mind.

My education has allowed me to be more open to ideas which I would not have been had I not been as educated.

Exposure to fields like design to technology and from art to psychology gave me a quite nice/interesting viewpoint to the world.

My father would make me stand on the table and make me sing. He would give me a P1 reward after every song.

I was watching Johnny Carson when I was way too young to be awake that late.

In junior high in Germany I fought kids all the time. I had such a bad temper, I almost got thrown out of school. A few lickings from my dad got me out of that scene. He wore me out with a paddle.

Results show that just one year of chess tuition will improve a student's learning abilities, concentration, application, sense of logic, self-discipline, respect, behavior and the ability to take responsibility for his/her own actions.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

I read an hour almost every night. It's part of falling asleep.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

My father only hit me once, but he used a Volvo.

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions.

I did a lot of thinking, and used mental activity to relieve whatever feelings I had. I became very left-brained, and I was good in school. That is, I was a smart kid.

Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

My first memory is of the brightness of light ... light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground ... very large white pillows.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

I have an IQ of about 160, I taught science for about fifteen years.

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

Music education can help spark a child's imagination or ignite a lifetime of passion. When you provide a child with new worlds to explore and challenges to tackle, the possibilities are endless. Music education should not be a privilege for a lucky few, it should be a part of every child's world of possiblity.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.