Michael Hirst Quotes

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

I'm big on research. I love research, so I tend to do a lot of reading.

One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

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.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

I love academics, theory and all that. I love and admire that and try to do as much reading as I can.

I love learning new things that will never be put to practical use.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.

And when I started college, I think I was good at two things: arguing and asking questions.

I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.

I like information. I love when smart people make me think of something in a new way.

I really enjoy researching, and for almost every piece, I research enough to write a book.

My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar.

I'm a huge believer in learning anything from multiple points of view.

I love researching, I love interviewing.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Constant and frequent questioning is the first key to wisdom … For through doubting we are led to inquire, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.

We should teach kids how to question. Now having said that, of course, to be a productive adult, there are certain skills that are required - reading, writing, and, in the old-fashioned days, we used to say arithmetic. Now we say mathematics.

I'm a voracious reader, I'm always studying.