Top 97 Instructive Quotes
#1. The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. Modern western man has some basic misconceptions about the nature of happiness. The origin of the word is instructive: happiness stems from the root verb to happen, which implies that our happiness is what happens.
Robert A. Johnson
#3. The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
Ernst Mach
#4. Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.
George Clooney
#5. Miss Hermione Jean Granger, I leave my copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive.
J.K. Rowling
#6. THE WISDOM OF THE SPHERES
How instructive
is a star!
It can teach us
from afar
just how small
each other are.
Piet Hein
#7. It is instructive, for instance, to trace the computer industry's decline in vision, idealism, creativity, romance and sheer fun as it becomes more and more important and prosperous.
Robert Shea
#8. Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
Simone Weil
#9. The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#11. I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.
Charlie Munger
#12. You will be surprised to find how much that has seemed hopelessly disagreeable possesses either an instructive or an amusing side." from "The Heart of the New Thought" 1902.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
#13. You don't have to live in community long to realize that lives which are blessed and instructive are still flawed. The grace of the gospel isn't only that the Word was made flesh in Jesus, but also that the eternal Word is made present in weak and wonderful people.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
#14. Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).
Edmund White
#15. A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
Oswald Chambers
#16. Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
Giorgio Baglivi
#17. To read the report of a discussion in which arguments for and against are presented, in which a subject has been covered from different points of view, with new ideas advanced - this is far more instructive than to read a brief account of the resolution passed on the matter.
Fredrik Bajer
#18. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies,
Flannery O'Connor
#19. Stumble is worse than falling, because stumble is not as instructive as the falling!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#20. It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.
Seamus Heaney
#21. Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity.
John Evelyn
#22. The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
Robertson Davies
#23. The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.
Daniel Webster
#24. As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people's children.
Andy Miller
#25. No less instructive is the story, 'Pooh Goes Visiting,' in which Rabbit, having deceitfully offered Pooh admittance to sample his overstocked larder, artfully traps his victim in the doorway and exploits him as an unsalaried towel rack for an entire week.
Frederick C. Crews
#26. On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
Chuck Wendig
#27. Just once it might be instructive to pretend you're accepting an award for failure, just to see who you would thank.
Robert Breault
#28. It is instructive, although somewhat disheartening, for the ardent advocate of a purely scientific psychology to contrast the practice and theories of his colleagues with those of the students of the principal physical sciences.
George Trumbull Ladd
#29. To grasp the essence of chirality, it is instructive to withdraw for a moment from the familiar three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one, into a plane, and enquire what chirality means there.
Vladimir Prelog
#30. It may be in the cultural particularities of people - in their oddities - that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.
Clifford Geertz
#31. Let us consider an alternative style of thinking, which we can call 'creative thinking.' It is playfully instructive to note that the word 'reactive' and the word 'creative' are made up of exactly the same letters. The only difference between the two is that you 'C' [see] differently.
John Quincy Adams
#32. All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on
our own, just as with life.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#33. John Dewey was right that "failure is instructive," then Tolstoy's life is, well, an instructional gold mine.
Leo Tolstoy
#34. Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.
Mark Twain
#36. Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
John Dewey
#37. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.
Ian Fleming
#39. To say that which is instructive and also pleasing.
John Heywood
#40. I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.
Paula Hawkins
#41. Perhaps the most instructive experience is to see the way governments all over the world are exclaiming, What are we going to do about the United States?!
Eric Mann
#43. What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.
Jeffrey Rosen
#44. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is instructive in painting a realistic portrayal of Lincoln and his methods for accomplishing his objectives. In fact, many good political biographies are useful in learning about power, strategy, and decision-making.
Jeffrey Pfeffer
#45. I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive.
Mark Twain
#46. These examples, though as unfit for the imitation, as they are repugnant to the genius of America, are notwithstanding ... very instructive proofs of the necessity of some institution that will blend stability with liberty.
James Madison
#47. Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them." "My
Marcel Proust
#48. From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.
Ian Hacking
#49. Gossip is instructive," said the Wizard. "It tells which way the wind is blowing.
Gregory Maguire
#50. The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
Adrienne Rich
#51. Enough studying, Joana. Sometimes living life is more instructive than studying it.
Ruta Sepetys
#52. In various talk th' instructive hours they past, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At every word a reputation dies.
Alexander Pope
#53. Growing up, in church we had the homily; at home it's what I call the 'momily' - the inspirational and instructive mom-isms that every family has.
Christine Pelosi
#55. The laws of a nation form the most instructive portion of its history
Edward Gibbon
#56. It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction - especially as the world beyond our hearths churns and convulses unknowably, yet perhaps just short of ultimate disaster.
Paul Di Filippo
#57. I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.
Samuel Johnson
#58. One who utters speech that isn't rough
But instructive and truthful
So that he offends no one,
Him I call Brahmin.
Anonymous
#59. A month's intelligent instruction in the theory of numbes ought to be twice as instructive, twice as useful, and at least 10 times as entertaining as the same amount of 'calculus for engineers'.
G.H. Hardy
#60. Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.
Jackson Browne
#62. Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.
Tom Brokaw
#63. The Prydain Companion is more than a quick reference or handy glossary, though it is all of that as well. Instructive, certainly. But, like any good companion, a pleasure to be with over a long period of time.
Lloyd Alexander
#64. When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.
Ann Townsend
#65. Walking purposefully, in the knowledge that no one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged, he set off across the wood and canvas wonderland of Interesting and Instructive Kinematography.
Terry Pratchett
#66. Reading across disciplinary categories in this way provides one of the main organizing logics of this book because instinct's presence, absence, and characterization within different disciplines is in itself instructive about the changes to sexuality taking place around the turn of the century.
Kathleen Frederickson
#67. I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.
Fred D'Aguiar
#68. I think it's very instructive to look at a man like Ramsey Ahmad Yousef, who almost brought down the World Trade Center in 1993. He's short some fingers, his body is scarred, he's missing an eye - because he was practicing and not getting it right. But eventually they get it right.
Michael Scheuer
#69. Everything a man writes about himself is instructive.
John Glassco
#70. When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
Ben Horowitz
#71. The way a government treats refugees is very instructive ...
Tony Benn
#73. From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.
John Quincy Adams
#74. It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done.
Leo Kottke
#75. I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.
Katherine Anne Porter
#76. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.
Mark Twain
#77. I think paranoia can be instructive in the right doses. Paranoia is a skill.
John Shirley
#78. There's nothing more instructive than the immediate response of an audience.
Roger Bart
#79. Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways
Franz Boas
#80. All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#81. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.
Joseph Campbell
#82. Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.
Donald Kagan
#83. Sweet or bitter, I am now convinced that all experience is enriching and rewarding. Above all, instructive.
Henry Miller
#84. Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.
Paul Klee
#85. Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.
Denis Diderot
#86. The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation
Mikhail Lermontov
#87. I learned about community organizing from my parents. As a child, their stories were so instructive.
Cory Booker
#88. Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,
teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world's good.
Samuel Smiles
#89. Back when George W. Bush was identifying his Axis of Evil, it struck me that a longer and more instructive list could be compiled of the Axis of the Humiliated (or Insulted and Injured, to borrow from Dostoevsky).
Serge Schmemann
#90. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
Mark Rippetoe
#91. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic's intelligence, or honesty, or both.
Anonymous
#92. Gardening is full of mistakes, almost all of them pleasant and some of them actually instructive.
Henry Mitchell
#93. The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...no special name '; 'if that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor ') 71
Vladimir Nabokov
#94. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive ... compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
Guy Debord
#95. I loved it, couldn't stop reading, I learnt many more things of medieval time.
Ken Follett
#96. If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
Anthony Robbins
