Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

Have the humility to learn from those around you.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‚how‘ and ‚why‘ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention. You don’t look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you’re listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Silence is safer than speech.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‚Does your teacher use class time well?‘ and, ‚When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?‘

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

I wrote my first song at 12 and remember someone asking, ‚What were you going through at 12 that you could write about?‘ I get what you’re saying, but 11, 12, 13 were the hardest years of my life. You learn everything. You learn how horrible things feel.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

But I’m pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

I’ve always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks – you learn craft, you learn structure, all that – as you go.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.