The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene DescartesRead
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Interpretation
Improving the mind requires reflection and contemplation rather than just acquiring knowledge.
Rene Descartes suggests that genuine intellectual growth comes not merely from accumulating facts or learning new information, but from taking the time to reflect deeply on what we already know. This idea emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and personal insight in the process of learning and understanding.
In practice
During a seminar on personal development.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed.
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
Before examining this more carefully and investigating its consequences, I want to dwell for a moment in the contemplation of God, to ponder His attributes in me, to see, admire, and adore the beauty of His boundless light, insofar as my clouded insight allows. Believing that the supreme happiness of the other life consists wholly of the contemplation of divine greatness, I now find that through less perfect contemplation of the same sort I can gain the greatest joy available in this life.
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.
We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.
They will not stop me, I will get my education, if it is in home, school or any place
So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.