Richard Saul Wurman Quotes & Sayings

We anguish over more school facilities and ignore the unlimited classroom that is our city. — Richard Saul Wurman

If you serve that God, all the others will be taken care of. My quote is: 'The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.' It is at that moment that you can make something understandable. — Richard Saul Wurman

In recognition that any good idea is a fragile thing, you have to give it a few minutes to breath - like a good red wine. — Richard Saul Wurman

The organization of information actually creates new information. — Richard Saul Wurman

One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all. — Richard Saul Wurman

My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day. — Richard Saul Wurman

A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England — Richard Saul Wurman

My definition of learning is to remember what you are interested in. If you don't remember something, you haven't learned it, and you are never going to remember something unless you are interested in it. These words dance together. 'Interest' is another holy word and drives 'memory'. Combine them and you have learning. — Richard Saul Wurman

People can be motivated to creativity simply with the instruction to "be creative." — Richard Saul Wurman

I believe I'm very normal. I'm hyper-normal. I'm more normal than anyone else I know. I think my thoughts, my indulgences, my desires, my pleasures may at first appear different, but that is only because they are more normal, not because they are more esoteric.
I believe I am bored when other people are bored, only faster. I am interested when others are interested, only more interested. But I also think I'm less, rather than more, intelligent than other people.
By indulging my interests through my life, and perhaps because of rather than despite many failures, I have been able to design my life. — Richard Saul Wurman

The most common definition of [the word information] is: the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.
This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work. — Richard Saul Wurman

I live by two credos: If you don't ask, you don't get. And most things don't work. — Richard Saul Wurman

Most of us do not even know how to ask a question. Most of us do not see the root of the word 'question' is 'quest'. Most of us don't have a quest in our life. — Richard Saul Wurman

The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something — Richard Saul Wurman

The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good. — Richard Saul Wurman

The key to making things understandable is to understand what it's like not to understand. — Richard Saul Wurman

Education is to learning as tour groups are to adventure. — Richard Saul Wurman

Accept ignorance; pay more attention to the question than the answer; never be afraid to go in the opposite direction. — Richard Saul Wurman

Learning can be defined as the process of remembering what you are interested in. — Richard Saul Wurman

I like to question the minutia, to get to the essence of things. The minutia of life is all about design. It's about the design of how you talk to another human being; it's the design of speech; it's the design of everything we do. We need to be better at listening, and we need to aim more directly at understanding and being understood. — Richard Saul Wurman

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say. — Richard Saul Wurman

The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work. He was selling his desire to learn about a subject. — Richard Saul Wurman

What situations can I create that allow me not to have the disease of familiarity? — Richard Saul Wurman

In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question. — Richard Saul Wurman

Order is no guarantee of understanding. Sometimes just the opposite is true. — Richard Saul Wurman

I am terribly fascinated with things that I don't understand. — Richard Saul Wurman

People never forget things, they just never remembered it in the first place because it was too boring — Richard Saul Wurman

Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload. — Richard Saul Wurman

You only understand information relative to what you already understand. — Richard Saul Wurman

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know. — Richard Saul Wurman