Expanding Perspectives Quotes

A university shouldn't be a place of comfort. It should be a place of discomfort because you want to disabuse these kids of whatever prejudices or preconceptions they have when they come. You're trying to get them to think and develop, not be a Johnny-one-note.

Everyone has to learn to think differently, bigger, to open to possibilities.

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

I think it's important to have as diverse of a feed as possible.

You need to rebel to see the other options and to get a much richer, fuller sense of the world. And it's only once you've worked through that and seen through that that you can come back and accept who you are. You have to try all the other options.

Read. It makes you more intelligent. It’s that simple. We all see the universe through the tiny keyhole of our own eyes, and every book is another keyhole from which you can gaze.

The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.

When we focus on others, our world expands.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

A mind that doesn't question its judgements, makes the world very small and dangerous.

There's a lot of disorder that comes along with wanting to know everything and wanting to try everything and wanting to experience everything, but there's a lot of knowledge that comes out of it too.

Really connecting with someone and maybe opening their mind a little bit, is such a cool thing to be able to do through music.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

Books are, at their heart, dangerous. Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways. They can push down the barricades of ‘them’ & widen the circle of ‘us.

I don't think anyone strives to be anything negative. I just think that it's our nature to only focus on a few things in life and forget about a lot of other stuff.

Education is the sum total of one's experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

... the stranger is not a threat but an opportunity to grow in my view of reality, to grow in my own sense of possibility

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

The biggest gains come from associating with people u DONT agree with!

I always knew I was going somewhere - going out. I just knew. I just knew. I just knew there were a lot more points of view out there.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

Surround yourself with people who make you feel stupid.