Great Throughts Treasury

"We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn."

"Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members."

"Education, whether for success or failure, is never finished. Building and sustaining the settings in which individuals can grow and unfold, not "kept in their place," but empowered to become all they can be, is not the only task of parents and teachers, but the basis of management and political leadership--and simple friendship. "

"Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool. "

"The need to sustain human growth should be a matter of concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than the problem of sustaining productivity. This, surely, is the deepest sense of homemaking, whether in a factory or a college or a household. "

"Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain. "

"The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. "

"Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten. "

"Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society."

"Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving. "

"In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain."

"When any relationship is characterized by difference, particularly a disparity in power, there remains a tendency to model it on the parent-child-relationship. Even protectiveness and benevolence toward the poor, toward minorities, and especially toward women have involved equating them with children. "

"The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors."

"The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future. "

"Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. "

"Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live."

"What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others. "

"The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it. "

"Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity. "

"Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps."

"Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another."

"The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe."

"A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility."

"As people grow older, some of the ways they have contributed in the past may no longer be possible, but the challenge to society is not only to provide help and care where these are needed but also to offer the opportunity to contribute and care for others."

"After all, most of us have lived lives based on commitments made without any way of knowing where they would lead. The uncertainty is an essential element in commitment, the acceptance of consequences an essential element in fidelity."

"Active wisdom--an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health."

"As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict... We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received."

"A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings."

"Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food."

"Goals too clearly defined can become blinders."

"Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities."

"It's all about being in control of myself as an older woman who lives alone, and it's all about how I am going to do what I have to do to be as strong as I can be and be confident that I can do what I need to do as an older person."

"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not."

"Rarely is it possible to study all of the instructions to a game before beginning to play, or to memorize the manual before turning on the computer. The excitement of improvisation lies not only in the risk of being involved but in the new ideas, as heady as the adrenaline of performance, that seems to come from nowhere."

"Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas, enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations."

"Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape."

"So this little boy was--I became her confidant a little too early, I think. It didn't seem to warp me exactly, but it left me with a little too much knowledge at an early age."

"The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful."

"There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors."

"Sorting gets harder as time goes on--it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire."

"Tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives."

"We never promised we would stay the same, but only we would shape our change from this now single clay."

"The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring."