The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Interpretation
Education transforms ignorance into understanding and openness.
This quote emphasizes that the fundamental aim of education is not merely to fill a student with knowledge, but to foster a mindset that is curious, adaptable, and open to new ideas. It suggests that true education enriches the mind, encouraging critical thinking and exploration rather than rote memorization.
In practice
In a graduation speech to motivate students about lifelong learning.
Over the years, I've evolved a somewhat heretical but time-and mind-saving approach to books, articles, editorials that deal with weighty matters. More often than not, by beginning at the end and contemplating the conclusions, one can determine if it's worth going through the whole to get there.
Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
To live long and achieve happiness, cultivate the art of radiating happiness.
If you never budge, don't expect a push.
It's never a good deal when only one party thinks it is.
How would you know what happy is if you've never been otherwise.
Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.
In examining witnesses, I learned to ask general questions so as to elicit details with powerful sensory associations: the colors, the sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the mind and put the listener in the burning house.
You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.
Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.
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