Julia Brodsky > Julia's Quotes

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Love truth, but pardon error.”
― Voltaire

“I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.”
― Voltaire

“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”
― Voltaire

“We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in.”
― john holt

“This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."

It is the creed of a slave.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“I doubt very much if it is possible to teach anyone to understand anything,
that is to say, to see how various parts of it relate to all the other parts, to
have a model of the structure in one's mind. We can give other people
names, and lists, but we cannot give them our mental structures; they must
build their own.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

“You think because you understand 'one' you must also understand 'two', because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and'.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain.”
― Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life

“You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“It is my conviction that there is no way to peace - peace is the way.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”
― John Dewey

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
― John Dewey

“We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“wonder is the mother of all science.”
― John Dewey, How We Think

“The only way to prepare for social life is to engage in social life. To form habits of social usefulness and serviceableness apart from any direct social need and motive, apart from any existing social situation, is, to the letter, teaching the child to swim by going through motions outside of the water.”
― John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education

“Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling.”
― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men. —JOHN DEWEY”
― Mike Byster, The Power of Forgetting: Six Essential Skills to Clear Out Brain Clutter and Become the Sharpest, Smartest You

“A single course of studies for all progressive schools is out of the question; it would mean abandoning the fundamental principle of connection with life-experiences.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Education

“Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method of modern science when he said that true knowledge begins with opinion.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Nature

“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life