verbal instruction Quotes

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

If I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening.

From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

Life would be a lot easier if conversations were rewindable and erasable, like videos. Or if you could instruct people to disregard what you just said, like in a courtroom.

Education is education, be it verbal or written.

...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.