The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.
Stanley FishRead
Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Sharing opinions can provide temporary satisfaction but may lack depth, while seeking truth requires effort and ultimately leads to personal growth.
In this quote, Stanley Fish illustrates the superficiality often found in opinion-sharing discussions, which can momentarily satisfy individuals but fail to truly fulfill them. In contrast, engaging in a diligent search for truth is likened to athletic training—it is challenging and can be exhausting, yet it enriches our understanding and fosters personal development over time, suggesting that meaningful inquiry leads to greater wisdom and fulfillment.
Themes
TruthInquiryOpinionsGrowthWisdom
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on critical thinking, this quote can be used to encourage students to delve deeper into subjects rather than just accepting surface-level opinions.
More from Stanley Fish
All quotes →This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.
Stanley FishRead
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
Stanley FishRead
It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.
Stanley FishRead
In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
Stanley FishRead
Similar quotes
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
Benjamin FranklinRead
Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.
Henry FordRead
The wind blows on us all, but it's how you set your ssail that makes the difference.
Jim RohnRead
We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.
C. S. LewisRead
Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.
Bronislaw MalinowskiRead
How can you get very far, If you don't know who you are? How can you do what you ought, If you don't know what you've got? And if you don't know which to do Of all the things in front of you, Then what you'll have when you are through Is just a mess without a clue Of all the best that can come true If you know What and Which and Who.
Benjamin HoffRead