Quotes on Learning LO4499

John Woods (jwoods@execpc.com)
Sat, 30 Dec 1995 09:19:47 -0600 (CST)

The following quotes are from a section of The Quality Yearbook, 1996
edition (McGraw-Hill, just published), called "Quotes on Quality." They
deal with ideas on learning and learning organizations. I thought you
might find them interesting.

You don't learn anything the second time you're kicked by a mule.
--Anonymous

True wisdom is plenty of experience, observation, and reflection. False
wisdom is plenty of ignorance, arrogance, and impudence.
--Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Often a liberal antidote of experience supplies a sovereign cure for a
paralyzing abstraction built upon a theory.
--Benjamin Nathan Cardozo

Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
--Clarence Day

Sensible people find nothing useless.
--Jean de La Fontaine

Desire to know why and how, curiosity, which is a lust of the mind, that by
a perseverance of delight is the continued and indefatigable generation of
knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.
--Thomas Hobbes

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens
to you.
--Aldous Huxley

The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by
an ugly fact.
--Thomas H. Huxley

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as
superstitions.
--Thomas H. Huxley

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to
spot wrong questions.
--Anthony Jay

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson
afterwards.
--Vernon Law (baseball pitcher)

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
--John Locke

Learning and visionary approaches appear to be superior to planning as means
for creating strategy.
--Henry Mintzberg

. . .by chance you will say, but chance only favors the mind which is prepared.
--Louis Pasteur

If people don't have their own vision, all they can do is _sign up_ for
someone else's. This result is compliance, never commitment.
--Peter M. Senge

It can be no dishonor to learn from others when they speak good sense.
--Sophocles

A man should never be ashamed to own he has be in the wrong, which is but
saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
--Jonathan Swift

And others' follies teach us not,
Nor much their wisdom teaches.'
And most, of sterling, is what
Our own experience preaches.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Does he have 17 years of experience or one year of experience 17 times?
--Paul R. Weisenfeld

If you want to know more about The Quality Yearbook, of which I am
co-editor), send me a personal message and I'll e-mail you the table of
contents and preface. One of themes of this year's edition is systems
thinking and learning organizations. And if you find all this a crass
attempt at bringing a product I'm involved with to your attention, please
forgive me.

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Host's Note to John and everyone: I think this mix of several screens of
interesting content to balance 2 lines of self promotion is just fine!

-- Rick Karash, rkarash@karash.com, host for leaning-org
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--
John Woods
jwoods@execpc.com