Rote Quotes (5 quotes)
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions and experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so.
From the summary section of Chapter 10, 'A Theory of Remembering', Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932, 1995), 213.
Science may be learned by rote, but Wisdom not.
(1759). From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, collected in Collection of Ancient and Modern British Novels and Romances (1832), Vol. 38, 311.
Sciences may be learned by rote, but Wisdom not.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman (1759-67), Penguin edition (1997), 324.
The professor may choose familiar topics as a starting point. The students collect material, work problems, observe regularities, frame hypotheses, discover and prove theorems for themselves. … the student knows what he is doing and where he is going; he is secure in his mastery of the subject, strengthened in confidence of himself. He has had the experience of discovering mathematics. He no longer thinks of mathematics as static dogma learned by rote. He sees mathematics as something growing and developing, mathematical concepts as something continually revised and enriched in the light of new knowledge. The course may have covered a very limited region, but it should leave the student ready to explore further on his own.
In A Concrete Approach to Abstract Algebra (1959), 1-2.
Words learned by rote a parrot may rehearse,
But talking is not always to converse;
Not more distinct from harmony divine,
The constant creaking of a country sign.
But talking is not always to converse;
Not more distinct from harmony divine,
The constant creaking of a country sign.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
