Alison Gopnik Quotes

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

Intellectual and emotional curiosity is what I hope I've taught my children.

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

It's very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

Ellis's understanding of himself and the world around him certainly develops because of his adventures, and part of that development comes through recognizing other people for what they are.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I think it is important for children to read different things to find out about their emotions and other people's emotions. It is an enormous source of education and culture.

If we learn to understand each other, we will have a better understanding of ourselves.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

I'm learning all the time. I'm evolving all the time as a human being. I'm getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.

I think obviously there's a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s .

To be able to always have a super sense of who I was and my own real identity and be petty and seem informed and always thinking in thoughts would be great.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

I am a good listener. I think that came from my schooling.

I think there is a point in every teenager's life where they are forced to come into themselves.

Education made us what we are.

Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is about human products in the past, but because of what it does in liberating human intelligence and human sympathy.

Everything when you're a teenager is a projection. Or at least, for me, it was. 'Who am I gonna be?'

Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

People don't know how to listen, and it's not their fault. In school, we learn how to read, we learn how to write - but nobody teaches you how to listen.

You find your personality real quick in school.