Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

Without theory we can only copy.

I'm very grateful to have had many brilliant students and post-docs who have worked with me. Potential is often hard to spot, but a key factor is whether they express a genuine interest in the problem and how they have thought about it.

Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented... They come from inventing new questions!

In a highly critical, scarcity-based world, everyone's afraid to fail. As long as we're afraid to fail, we'll never come up with the big, bold ideas we need to solve these problems.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

The focus of education should not be on suppressive information but on kindling the thirst for knowing.

Good thinkers are always in demand. A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

Ask BIG questions, find BIG answers.

[America] doesn't have an emphasis anymore on original discovery. Everything is based on teaching and learning for tests. Memorizing what you are taught, not on actually making discoveries. People are being treated as herded cattle instead of as human beings capable of making original, creative discoveries.