Dionysius Lardner Quotes

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

Let no man who is not a Mathematician read the elements of my work.

It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.

The idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.

I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

Mathematics is not merely an idle art form, it is an essential part of our society.

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.

Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

If you follow the process of a thought - any thought, not just about art - the thought changes. It has to do with what you can hold in your memory and what you lose. That's an interesting thing to try to paint.

Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?

Dancing is a very living art. It is essentially of the moment, although a very old art. A dancer's art is lived while he is dancing. Nothing is left of his art except the pictures and the memories--when his dancing days are over.

To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on memory alone.

The dry knowledge of the three R's is not even now, it can never be, a permanent part of the villagers' life.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

Your memory and your senses will be nourishment for your creativity.

The sea is greater than us - it has its rhythm, its art. It comes with our earliest memory, of respiration, breathing in and out.

A person must have a good memory to keep the promises he has made. A person must have a strong imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect.