Cognitive Advancement Quotes

The only 'good' learning is that which is in advance of development.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

Reading becomes the fuel for development.

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.

Anatomically modern humans are found up to 200,000 years ago; behaviourally modern humans appear very recently in evolutionary time, as far as evidence now exists, perhaps within a window of 50-100,000 years ago, a flick of an eye in evolutionary time.

Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

Thus with every advance in our scientific knowledge new elements come up, often forcing us to recast our entire picture of physical reality. No doubt, theorists would much prefer to perfect and amend their theories rather than be obliged to scrap them continually. But this obligation is the condition and price of all scientific progress.

Knowledge does not grow like a tree where you dig a hole, plant your feet, cover them with dirt, and pour water on them daily. Knowledge grows with time, work, and dedicated effort. It cannot come by any other means.

Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.

But I do think that when people say 'a learning curve,' they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upward.

Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.

Learning. It's really the primary reason behind everything I do. Programming, entrepreneuring, writing.

Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

Education gives sobriety to the young, comfort to the old, riches to the poor and is an ornament to the rich.

The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most.

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

Abandon learning and there will be no sorrow.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.

If a person is constantly evolving, constantly reading new material and being exposed to new material and growing in life, then you're becoming, hopefully, a more intelligent and well-rounded individual. If you're not then something's wrong and you're sliding back in the other direction.

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.