We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Daniel DennettRead
Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Making mistakes can provide valuable lessons and clarity for improvement.
This quote by Daniel Dennett emphasizes the significance of mistakes in the learning process. Rather than shying away from errors, actively seeking them can lead to clearer insights and a better understanding of how to improve or rectify a situation. Mistakes serve as important reference points in our personal and intellectual growth.
Themes
MistakesLearningGrowthImprovementClarity
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech to students about embracing their failures.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes →Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Daniel DennettRead
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
Daniel DennettRead
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
Daniel DennettRead
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We have nothing to lose by trusting the infinite power of the Self, except the bondage of our own ignorance.
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A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
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What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that's how I approached the part.
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They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
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