Howard Gardner Quotes

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes. Still, most scientists and most historians would concur that the broad strokes I've sketched, when viewed from sufficient distance, are accurately rendered—that is, that science and history are each in pursuit of statements that represent the truths ascertained by their respective disciplines

Thanks to his own thought experiments, his formal education, and his study of authors like Foppl, Einstein already had identified the set of issues that would occupy him for years to come: the relation between electricity and magnetism, the putative role of the ether, and conceptions of space and time, as formulated by a philosopher like Kant or a scientific thinker like Maxwell. Einstein later recalled:

What made the greatest impression upon the student, however, was less the technical construction of mechanics or the solution of complicated problems than the achievements of mechanics in areas which apparently had nothing to do with mechanics: the mechanical theory of light, which conceived of light as the wave-motion of a quasi-rigid elastic ether and above all the kinetic theory of gases.

Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes.

Stories are the single most powerful weapon in a leader’s arsenal

For the most part, performances of young children fall under the rubric of rote, ritualized, or conventional patterns of behavior, but children sometimes go beyond the models that they have seen, and their performances may embody genuine understandings. In such cases children are able to utilize symbol systems to create performances that reveal sensitivity to a variety of perspectives or express their own feelings or beliefs about a state of affairs. As psychiatrist Robert Coles has shown, children caught in political or social crises are especially prone to exhibit their understandings through works of literary or graphic art, and these works may reflect both a rounded sense of a controversial issue and the creator's personal response to it.

By introducing these elements at the outset, I wish to stress that all creative activity grows, first, out of the relationships between an individual and the objective world of work and, second, out of the ties between an individual and other human beings.

It cannot be overstated that the emphasis on visual thinking among German-speaking scientists and engineers circa 1900 was widespread. Yet in 1905 it was Einstein who combined visual thinking with Gedanken experiments and quasiaesthetic notions with dazzling results.

And Einstein stood out among natural scientists in his abiding curiosity about children's minds. He had once declared that we know all the physics that we will ever need to know by the age of three.

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

I see Freud as energized by three motivations: pleasure in classifying, lust for problem solving, passion for system building.

Moreover, if one can present a topic in several ways, two important outcomes ensue. First, one reaches more students; after all, some students learn better from narrative entry points and others from social or artistic entries. Second, one conveys to students the idea that disciplinary experts readily conceive of topics in more than one way. There is no royal road to disciplinary understanding.

Discover your difference — the asynchrony with which you have been blessed or cursed — and make the most of it.

In a typical approach, historiometric investigators like Simonton review large bodies of data to determine the decade of life in which creative individuals are most productive. Such studies have led to the findings that maximal productivity typically occurs between ages thrity-five and thirty-nine, but that profiles differ appreciably across disparate domains of knowledge: thus, poets and mathematicians reach an apogee in their twenties or thirties, while historians or philosophers may peak decades later.

"In his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud recalled: "When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressure and preoccupations of today, it seems to me like a glorious 'heroic era'; my 'splendid isolation' was not lacking in advantages and in charms." It is striking that one encounter virtually the same words and affects-the heights and the depths- in the recollections of other innovators as they reflect on their subjective state on the eve of their greatest breakthroughs."

The less a person understands his own feelings, the more he will fall prey to them. The less a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of others, the more likely he will interact inappropriately with them and therefore fail to secure his proper place in the world.