To ask the proper question is half of knowing.
Interpretation
Asking the right questions is essential to gaining knowledge.
This quote by Roger Bacon emphasizes the importance of inquiry and critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge. By framing the right questions, one can uncover deeper understanding and insights, making questioning a vital part of the learning process.
In practice
A teacher might use this quote to encourage students to ask more insightful questions during class discussions.
There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.
The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
There are two modes of knowledge: through argument and through experience. Argument brings conclusions and compels us to concede them, but it does not cause certainty nor remove doubts that the mind may rest in truth, unless this is provided by experience.
The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing stock from a mathematician's point of view.
Mathematics is the gate and key to science.
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.
I never teach the same course twice.
Better guide the young than reclaim them when old For the voice of true wisdom is calling "To rescue the fallen is good, but tis best To prevent other people from falling" Better close up the source of temptation and crime Than deliver from dungeon or gallery Better put a strong fence round the top of the cliff Than an ambulance down in the valley.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
Not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education.
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