About life and happiness …
‘La vie est une aventure audacieuse ou elle n’est rien’ – ‘Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing’ Helen Keller
‘The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be’ – Marcel Pagnol
‘Proud people bear sad sorrows for themselves’ – Nietsche
‘Man [and woman] reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90’ – Danish author Isaak Dinesen (1885-1962)
‘Arguing with a teenager is like mudwrestling a pig; you both end up dirty but only the pig is happy about it.’ – quoted by Andrew Fuller, clinical psychologist and author of Tricky Kids
‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.’ – William Blake about childhood
‘Women are like tea bags, you don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water’ – Eleanor Rooseveldt
A poem my dearest friend Claire shared with me:
If I had a lot of money
And all my debts were paid
I’d buy that house
And fix it up
The way it used to be
And I’d find some people
Who wanted a home
And give it to them free
‘When a child smiles something important has occurred’ – from my daughter Kate Spencer, 14 December 2010
About education …
‘Adding up [the] small victories and subtracting [the] minor defeats’ – a description of the progress of ‘education revolution’ as measured by bureaucrats and public policy experts the world over – The Courier Mail 1 Feb 2008 article Softly, softly goes the revolution
‘Celebrating education as an engine of equity and the economy’ – Catherine Armitage Higher Education Editor The Australian 9 May 2007
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ – Albert Einstein who came up with the theory of relativity by imaging he was riding on a beam of light – cited by Craig Emerson Minister for Small Business in The Australian 8 December 2008 in an article titled Ideas the engine of new growth – education the key to success in the 21st century
‘Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a flame’ – William Blake
‘At universities you learn ABOUT at Temenos http://www.temenosacademy.org/ you learn FROM’ – Barbara Blackman (former wife of artist Charles Blackman) 24 October 2009 introducing Art Historian Andrew Wolpert at the National Gallery of Victoria
What=surface; How=deep; Why=profound – John West-Burnham’s education rubric
People are much more likely ‘to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think themselves into a new way of acting’ – Professor Herminia Ibarra 2003 cited in Regenerating the Australian landscape of professional VET Practice – Jane Figgis NCVER 2009
About technology, innovation and work …
‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses’ – Henry Ford
‘There are 10 types of people in the world: those that understand binary and those that don’t.’ – this appeared in an email from Ian Pearshouse JISC Learning Research Systems Manager Nottingham Uni 13 Sep 2008
‘Creating imaginary problems to solve in an existence unnaturally and possibly dangerously deficient in real ones’ – Susan Maushart in The winter of our Disconnect pages 70-71
‘There are no solutions just problems rearranged’ – Chuck B Smith
‘Managers do things right; leaders see the right thing is done’ – Warren Bennis founding father of Leadership studies quoted in The Age 31 January 2011 from Guardian article by Aditya Chakrabortty about Steve Jobs
‘A resource shared is a resource squared’ – Mark Pesce
About music and literature …
‘After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music’ – Aldous Huxley
‘Some books never leave us. They shadow our subsequent reading and writing; they cast an altered light on whatever follows’ – Gail Jones in The Weekend Australian 6-7 August 2011
