Good words

The expert is one who, having incorporated his tools, is unaware of them.  – Douglas Harding

Practice helps us own our knowledge

"The benefit of a flight simulator is that it allows pilots to internalize their new knowledge.  Instead of memorizing lessons, a pilot can train the emotional brain, preparing the parts of the cortex that will actually make the decision when up in the air." -- Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide  

Great point.  When faced with a situation that requires action, we rarely have time to think, "What was that approach we talked about during Day Three of management training?"  We act from the gut.  And we train the gut through practice.

Good words

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. –  Woodrow Wilson

Good words

Part of creativity means keeping your learning curve as high as possible, and part of teaching is learning. - Yo-Yo Ma

Good words

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. – Thomas J. Watson

Good words

Tell me and I'll forget.

Show me and I'll remember.  

Involve me and I'll understand.  - Confucius

Good words

To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light. - Carl G. Jung

Good words

[Leonard] Bernstein was always able to take big risks. He never fell off the first rung of the ladder, he always fell off the top rung. - Stephen Sondheim

From the Gateless Gate

Ten thousand flowers in spring,

the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,
snow in winter.

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

Photo by Howard Wolinsky

Good words

We must realize, if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, that the currency for compassion isn’t what someone else does, right or wrong – it is the very fact that that person exists.

- Sharon Salzberg

Good words

Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think. - Deborah Loewenberg Ball, in an excellent article on the elements of good teaching.

Good words

Integrity is the essence of everything successful. - R. Buckminster Fuller

Good words

The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you "come to terms with" only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will. - Ingrid Bengis

Good words

You don't teach someone to the limit of their ability; you teach them to the limit of your ability. - Aubrey C. Daniels

Good words

Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question. ...The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn.
...you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

No foolin'

One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn’t know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings, blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don’t perceive. - Jonah Lehrer

Good words

Insight requires a clean slate - Mark Jung-Beeman, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide

Good words

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. – Joseph Chilton Pearce

Good words

Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction. - Francis Picabia

Good words

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. - Gertrude Stein