Quotes & Sayings About Unlearning

A good deal of education consists of unlearning-the breaking of bad habits as with a tennis serve. — Mary McCarthy

When such patterns are triggered in therapy, it gives the patient a chance to look at them and change them, for as we saw in chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," positive bonds appear to facilitate neuroplastic change by triggering unlearning and dissolving existing neuronal networks, so the patient can alter his existing intentions. — Norman Doidge

The deeper education consists in unlearning one's first education. — Paul Valery

Life is not how we lead it. It is how children are born to lead it. — Raheel Farooq

When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else. — Anne Lamott

This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it. Remember, — C.S. Lewis

All mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning. — Richard Rohr

You see, unlearning is a very important process towards becoming enlightened, because in this life you will have learned wrong ways and those wrong ways that you have learned are barriers blocking you from becoming who you really are, therefore it is vital that they are unlearned. — Andrew James Pritchard

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it "conversion" or "repentance. — Richard Rohr

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. — Robert Bringhurst

How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledge. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath. — Mary Barnett Gilson

Wisdom is unlearning what you have learnt. — Amit Abraham

The results you are churning out are a direct or indirect reflection of what you allowed into your life. Unlearning what you already know and practice is no easy task, but sometimes it's necessary for the programming or re-programming that must take place for success to be made deliberate. — Archibald Marwizi

They want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would be preferred: in a word, woman is losing modesty. And let us immediately add that she is also losing taste. She is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who "unlearns to fear" sacrifices her most womanly instincts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition
that you don't know as much as you thought you knew. — Scott Adams

Faith is unlearning the senseless worries and misguided beliefs that keep us captive. — Mark Batterson

While it has become "cool" for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism. — Bell Hooks

Half of learning is learning. The other half of learning is unlearning. — Mark Batterson

Faith is unlearning this senseless worries and misguided beliefs that keep us captive. It is far more complex than simply modifying behavior. Faith is rewiring the human brain. We are literally upgrading our minds by downloading the mind of Christ. — Mark Batterson

In Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers ... it was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton ... It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell that I first heard of relativity.
The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one.
That is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge ... However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science. — Isaac Asimov

The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb. — Cathy Davidson

For only by unlearning Wisdom comes. — James Russell Lowell

Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm. — Jerry Saltz

Education is a process of unlearning and learning. — Debasish Mridha

It's not a question of learning much.On the contrary.It's a question of UNLEARNING much.' Osho — Osho

Scepticism is as much the result of knowledge, as knowledge is of scepticism. To be content with what we at present know, is, for the most part, to shut our ears against conviction; since, from the very gradual character of our education, we must continually forget, and emancipate ourselves from, knowledge previously acquired; we must set aside old notions and embrace fresh ones; and, as we learn, we must be daily unlearning something which it has cost us no small labour and anxiety to acquire. — Homer

Knowledge grows, and simultaneously it becomes obsolete as reality changes. Understanding involves both learning new knowledge and discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge. The discarding activity--unlearning--is as important a part of understanding as is adding new knowledge. — Bo Hedberg

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation. — Bell Hooks

Beyond learning and unlearning is awareness, and beyond awareness is consciousness, and beyond consciousness is immortality, and beyond immortality is dharma and beyond dharma is nirvana. — Frederick Lenz

Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it. — C.S. Lewis

[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into ... It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death. — C.S. Lewis

She asked me to tell her what it is to rule," Paul said. "And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do." She hit a mark there right enough, Hawat thought. He nodded for Paul to continue. "She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men. — Frank Herbert

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us. — Marianne Williamson

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It's more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude. — Richard Rohr

If you must then hire for passion first, experience second and credentials third. Then train those hired for directed passion, dropping the excess baggage and the whole process of unlearning. An entrepreneur is much like an architect shapping human resources into a well crafted power house. — Nikhil Sharda

You will free yourself from emotional drama by uncovering all the lies you believe in. It is a process of unlearning the lies. It is a period of cleansing, and it has nothing to do with the dream of society. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. — Edsger Dijkstra

Most of your healing journey will be about unlearning the patterns of self-protection that once kept you safe. — Vironika Tugaleva

I don't categorize things merely to simplify my understanding. I'd rather delve into the process of unlearning. — Nikhil Sharda

There are essentially two questions in life - a spiritual question and a material question. The spiritual question is 'Who am I?' The material question is 'What am I to do with my life?' One leads to the other. — Rasheed Ogunlaru

The professor argues against measuring effectiveness in the shallow short-term in the "fierce humanities," for teaching that seeks not merely learning, but unlearning, that seeks to unsettle knowledge and assumptions in ways more fundamental than any exam can or should test. — Cary Nelson

In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future. This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage and let us tear off the mask. — Victor Hugo

There is no man to whom a good mind comes before an evil one. It is the evil mind that gets first hold on all of us. Learning virtue means unlearning vice. We should therefore proceed to the task of freeing ourselves from faults with all the more courage because, when once committed to us, the good is an everlasting possession; virtue is not unlearned. — Seneca.

I think unknowing is the most important theological idea for me. Unlearning the things you think you know. — Darcey Steinke

One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years - learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this - then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make without thought, fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me. — Edward Weston

The secret of meditation is the art of unlearning. Mind is learning; meditation is unlearning: that is - die constantly to your experience; let it not imprison you; experience becomes a dead weight in the living and flowing, riverlike consciousness. — Rajneesh

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? — Jonathan Safran Foer

9/11 was an INSIDE JOB...WAKE THE FUCK UP! — Patrick Michael Mooney

I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true — R. Buckminster Fuller

Seymour once said to me - in a crosstown bus, of all places - that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold. — J.D. Salinger

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day. — Alan W. Watts

We are all shaped by the tools we use, in particular: the formalisms we use shape our thinking habits, for better or for worse, and that means that we have to be very careful in the choice of what we learn and teach, for unlearning is not really possible. — Edsger Dijkstra

The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love. — Marianne Williamson

I don't think you ever learn just one thing. At some point you start unlearning things. I have been working hard to unlearn everything I know. — Terry Gilliam

Success, for most people, requires unlearning as much as learning. — Orrin Woodward

Personal growth is not a matter of learning new information but of unlearning old limits. — Alan Cohen

You learn who you are by unlearning who they taught you to be. — Nikki Rowe

There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know; this is called research. Now perhaps comes the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed. — Roland Barthes

It is the evil mind that gets first hold on all of us. Learning virtue means unlearning vice. We — Seneca.

Most arguments are about programming; most resolutions are reached through a process of unlearning then relearning. — Oli Anderson

Being in the image and likeness of this Creator, you are infinitely powerful, abundant, peaceful and perfect in the exact same way. You may have forgotten this, but evolution and growth is all about remembering what you already are. Step by step, you realize higher aspects of yourself. You remember. As such, there is nothing new to learn. All you are doing is unlearning the original error, step by step, at whatever rate you choose. — David Cameron Gikandi

Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskillful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again, how to be here without any mind. — Rajneesh

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live. — Albert Camus

As one man said, "I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it." That's what spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you. — Anthony De Mello

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. — Molly Ivins

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes. — Charles Yang

Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity. — Madeleine L'Engle