Tabula Rasa Quotes

“I am no blank slate for love to write on.
My heart has walls marred with cracks,
bloodstains, and bullet holes;
graffitied over by past lovers.”
― John Mark Green

“She would never know she was still alive because of me.”
― Rita Dinis, Tabula Rasa

“Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Philosophers who have denied that there are any innate ideas probably meant only that all ideas were copies of our impressions. [W]hat is meant by ‘innate’? If ‘innate’ is equivalent to ‘natural’, then all the perceptions and ideas of the mind must be granted to be innate or natural, in whatever sense we take the latter word, whether in opposition to what is uncommon, what is artificial, or what is miraculous. If innate means ‘contemporary with our birth’, the dispute seems to be frivolous—there is no point in enquiring when thinking begins, whether before, at, or after our birth.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

“Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“. . . she was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying lightening is hazardous. It's a statement of fact that will always be a given.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Depraved Heart

“Δίχως ενήλικα μιλήματα μαθαίνουμε καλύτερα την αλήθεια
λογχίζοντας τον τρόμο της ζωής μ' ένα άγραφο βλέμμα.”
― Νίκος Καρούζος, Ποιήματα

“Met nozems heb ik niet veel te maken.”
― Petra Hermans, Voor een betere wereld

“De penseel strijkt over het papier.”
― Petra Hermans

“Every man comes into the world like a clean sheet of paper, and then the people and circumstances around him begin vying with each other to dirty this sheet and cover it with writing... Gradually the sheet is dirtied, and the dirtier with so-called "knowledge" the sheet becomes, the cleverer the man is considered to be... And the dirty sheet itself, seeing that people consider its "dirt" as merit, considers it valuable.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World