I never teach until I've spoken to the fighter. I have to first determine his emotional state, get his background, to find out what I have to do, how many layers I have to keep peeling off so that I get to the core of the person so that he can recognize, as well as I, what is there.
Interpretation
Teaching should be personalized and dependent on the emotional and personal background of the learner.
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding a student's emotional state and personal history before imparting knowledge. Cus D'Amato suggests that effective teaching involves peeling away layers to reach the core of a person, highlighting the need for empathy and personal connection in the educational process.
In practice
In a workshop about mentoring, a speaker mentioned this quote to stress the importance of connecting with mentees.
When two men step into the ring, one and only one deserves to win. When you step into the ring, you gotta know you deserve to win. You gotta know destiny owes you victory , cause you trained harder than your opponent. You sparred harder. You ran farther.
Greatness is not a measure of how great you are but how great others came to be because of you
The hero and the coward both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts his fear and converts it into fire.
Every fighter that ever lived had fear. A boy comes to me and tells me that he's not afraid, if I believed him I'd say he's a liar or there's something wrong with him. I'd send him to a doctor to find out what the hell's the matter with him, because this is not a normal reaction. The fighter that's gone into the ring and hasn't experienced fear is either a liar or a psychopath.
Boxing is a contest of character and ingenuity. The boxer with more will, determination, desire, and intelligence is always the one who comes out the victor.
To see a man beaten not by a better opponent but by himself is a tragedy.
The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.
Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
Education is power, it changes your whole life, it can create a life for yourself. So the more educated you are, the more you learn about what you care about, you become a more caring person. And if you can speak about what you care about to a person you disagree with, without denigrating or insulting them, then you may actually be heard. And you may even change their mind, or they may change yours.
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
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