Quotes & Sayings About Tabula Rasa

For a long time, for years, I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying to grow without light, putting out white shoots that will inevitably wither. — May Sarton

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa. — Richard Powers

Perhaps, some day, humanity can start afresh, a new world, a tabula rasa, a world with a mind without prior experiences. No memories and no pain. A day when the ones with abundance do not look down at the poor and the needy, a day when we learn to care for the victims, the fallen souls of civilization and advancement, a day when the world will be pure. When all of humanity becomes a clean sheet of parchment, without knowledge and prejudice, simple, hungry for knowing, tasting, and feeling; hungry for life and ready to absorb the ink of experience. — Henry Martin

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason. — Murray Rothbard

She was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying lightening is hazardous. It's a statement of fact that will always be a given. — Patricia Cornwell

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. — Albert Einstein

My alcoholism is in no way any sort of excuse for any of my past behaviors. Just because I quit drinking, my life was not suddenly transformed into a tabula rasa-if I have wronged someone, drunk or not, then the responsibility for this lies squarely with me. And I must do my best to set things square with that person. ...
....And just because I am sober now does not mean anyone else should care. I do not deserve a cookie for finally trying to act like a decent human being. — D. Randall Blythe

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. — Edward O. Sisson

To try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. — David Foster Wallace

She would never know she was still alive because of me. — Rita Dinis

Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term. — Steven Pinker

Of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. — C.S. Lewis

Philosophers who have denied that there are any innate ideas probably meant only that all ideas were copies of our impressions. [W]hat is meant by 'innate'? If 'innate' is equivalent to 'natural', then all the perceptions and ideas of the mind must be granted to be innate or natural, in whatever sense we take the latter word, whether in opposition to what is uncommon, what is artificial, or what is miraculous. If innate means 'contemporary with our birth', the dispute seems to be frivolous - there is no point in enquiring when thinking begins, whether before, at, or after our birth. — David Hume

I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves. — Seymour Hersh

Begin at the beginning. Know nothing. Tabula rasa. At the same time, part of me wanted to distinguish myself. To let her sense the bond we shared straightaway. Maybe subtly hint at some of my secret intelligence. A secret handshake. A nod. I now completely understood how criminal masterminds could so easily get caught before the big reveal - the temptation to boast about the execution was huge. — Olivia Sudjic

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me. — Thom Mayne

The mind of a baby is a tabula rasa; society writes information on his mind. — Debasish Mridha

What we need,' Henry says, 'is a fresh start. A blank slate. Let's call her Tabula Rasa. — Audrey Niffenegger

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see". — Richard Rohr

I'm kind of a quiet leader, and I just try to lead by example. But then sometimes you have to say something. — Chamique Holdsclaw

Following Locke's doctrine that the mind is a tabula rasa, Helvetius considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction. — Bertrand Russell

Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims. — Bell Hooks

Even when apologising, this guy turns on the charm. And the worst thing is that it works.
She had reached a point in her life where she no longer expected anything from men, though that didn't stop her from falling in love with them. — Guillaume Musso

It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction. — Kenneth Frampton

Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying my welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I did get thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in that sordid place. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest? — Greg Rucka

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.
But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock. — Franklin Foer

Saturday afternoon, although occurring at regular and well-foreseen intervals, always takes this railway by surprise. — W.S. Gilbert

I think Hollywood is in love with sequels. If it's successful once, just jazz it up and shoot it out there again. I think it's unfortunate. — Paul Newman

Suddenly, the world I had scrutinised for so long was all around me, as if I had leaned forward and climbed into the television like Alice through the looking-glass. I had no idea just how deep the rabbit hole would go. — Simon Pegg

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. — David Grinspoon

Byron; and, realistically, quite a number of those infants will die without my care, and Josephine is hardly a creature with potential, hardly anybody's idea of a tabula rasa, a blank slate - hell, she's a slate that's had bad math scrawled on it and then been waxed so that nothing can ever be written on it again. I've treated sheep that had more of a right to live. — Tim Powers

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate. — Stanislav Grof

If the clinician, as observer, wishes to see things as they really are, he must make a tabula rasa of his mind and proceed without any preconceived notions whatever. — Jean-Martin Charcot

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature. — Theodore Dalrymple

In the chalky trough under the blackboard
are lessons dusted and already forgotten.
The teacher is squawking away once more,
scratching into the dark Welsh tabula rasa
the truths so far about God and arithmetic
with the expungible white of fossil shells. — Richie McCaffery

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create. — Frank Herbert