Some of these are my own discoveries,
others were simply stolen from other collectors.
Take what you want !
Praise up the humanities, my boy. That will make them think you are broad-minded.
Winston Churchill 1874-1965
Hands-on
Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.
There is nothing in the mind that has not been previously in the senses.
Anonymous
One must learn by doing the thing; though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
Sophocles 495-406 BC
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
Jacob Bronowski 1908-1974
Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.
William Gilbert 1540-1603
I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
Those who are good at archery learnt from the bow and not from Yi the Archer. Those who know how to manage boats learnt from boats and not from Wo [the legendary boatman]. Those who can think learnt for themselves and not from the sages.
Kuan Yin Tze 8th Century
Concept development
Socrates: Shall we set down astronomy among the objects of study?
Glaucon: I think so, to know something about the seasons, the months and the years is of use for military purposes, as well as for agriculture and for navigation.
Socrates: It amuses me to see how afraid you are, lest the common herd of people should accuse you of recommending useless studies.
Plato ca 429-347 BC
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood… Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.
Daniel Hudson Burnham 1846-1912
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.
He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.
Horace 65-8 BC
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan 1911-
The maverick approach
He that leaves nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
Lord Halifax 1633-1695
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Jacob Bronowski 1908-1974
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Barnett Cocks 1907-
Living movements do not come out of committees.
Cardinal John Newman 1801-1890
Search your parks in all your cities, you’ll find no statues of committees….
Source unknown. Can anybody tell me?
Expansion means complexity and complexity decay (Parkinson’s Third Law).
Cyril Northcote Parkinson 1909-
Exhibit design
[Occam’s Razor] Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.
William of Occam 1300-1349
You find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
Winnie-the-Pooh
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Field Marshal Helmuth Von Moltke 1800-1891
The concrete before the abstract
I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model of the subject I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise I do not.
Lord Kelvin 1824-1907
Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your Teacher.
William Wordsworth 1770-1850 (Strange Fits of Passion)
To a man who has not eaten a globe fish, we cannot speak of its flavour.
Taibai -1842
Explanations
‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’
Lewis Carroll
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.
Alfred Korzybski 1879-1950
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams 1838-1918
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
Maria Montessori 1870-1952 (The Absorbent Mind)
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords…
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson 1850-94 (Virginibus Puerisque)
It gets you nowhere if the other person’s tail is only just in sight for the second half of the conversation.
Eeyore
Should we always supply an answer?
‘You damn sadist,’ said mr cummings,
‘you try to make people think.
Ezra Pound 1885-1972
Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.
Francis Bacon 1561-1626
Give me fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
Vifredo Pareto 1848-1923
Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.
Terry Pratchett
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugène Ionesco 1912-
Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.
Muriel Spark 1918- (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Ch. 2)
Letting visitors speak
First listen my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster.
Aristophanes ca 444-ca 380 BC
. . . ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’
Graham Wallas 1858-1932
Attitudes before understanding
A child of the new generation
Refused to learn multiplication.
He said ‘Don’t conclude
That I’m stupid or rude;
I am simply without motivation.’
Joel Henry Hildebrand 1881-
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1904-1990 (New Scientist , 21 May 1964, `Education in 1984′)
We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit.
Robert H. Shaffer
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France 1844-1924
Honest simplicity
The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
Francis Bacon 1561-1626
I was in a Printing-house in hell and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
William Blake 1757-1827
Facts do not speak.
Jules Henri Poincaré 1854-1912
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
Guid gear gangs intae sma bouk.
Scottish proverb
Great minds
To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
John Buchan 1875-1940
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of men who make for men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
Godfrey Hardy 1877-1947 (Ouch!)
I do not subscribe to the ‘Exploding Custard’ kind of science communication.
Richard Dawkins (Professor of Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University, speaking at the British Association Annual Festival of Science, at Leeds University in 1997.)
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
Ernest Rutherford 1871-1937 (Physics Today 1970, October, p33)
I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting…not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.
Thomas Edison (The Dangers of Electric Lighting, North American Review, November, 1889)
Respect for youth
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
Robert Oppenheimer 1904-1967
Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development.
Jerome Bruner 1915-
It’s never too late for a happy childhood.
Dr. Who (BBC Children’s TV character)
Science and the humanities
Science grows and beauty dwindles.
Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892 (Discuss!)
Whoever wins to a great scientific truth will find a poet before him in the quest.
Frederic Wood-Jones 1879-1954
You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.
Paul Claudel 1868-1955
There is grandeur in this view of life…
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882
Science and religion
The ‘conflict’ between the fundamental realities of Religion and the established facts of Science, is seen to be unreal as soon as Religion and Science each recognises the true borders of its dominion.
Rabbi J.H.Hertz
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
…tis a dangerous thing to ingage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural World, in opposition to Reason; lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made Scripture to assert.
Rev. Thomas Burnet (The Sacred Theory of the Earth 1681)
I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
The humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than the deepest search after science.
Thomas à Kempis 1380-1471