Cognitive Expansion Quotes

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Never stop learning; knowledge doubles every fourteen months.

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

A university is supposed to show you ideas that offend you and make you feel uncomfortable,

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

I feel that a world in which you only see what you want to see is incomplete. And as a game creator, I am only here to prepare a game that will expand the breadth of your thinking, and leave the decision between good and evil up to the players.

The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind.

The minute that you're not learning I believe you're dead.

There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.

A very important part of life is growth - I need to learn things every day.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of interest and brainpower.

Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.

The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.

You only stop learning when you quit.