We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

On the ‚Star,‘ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

Today, I’d like to talk to Bob Marley. I’d just like to ask him what was his method. Bob is one of the greatest songwriters ever. I don’t know if people understand how powerful his songs are and the simplicity and genius behind them, from ‚Redemption Song‘ to ‚Is This Love?‘ and ‚I Shot the Sheriff.‘

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.

Genius, when young, is divine.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

I didn’t get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.

There’s room for role models who make mistakes.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.

One of the skills I had to learn and become proficient in is kissing a man. I had never kissed a man. Will Smith did it in his movies, so did Jake Gyllenhaal, and I figured it was my time. So it was me and Steve Carell – fantastic.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

When I was a young kid, I did not even dream about playing for my country. It was such a farfetched thing to play for India.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

I went to a lovely school, and I got an incredible education. And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, ‚cause I’m very smart.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

No driver is perfect.