Rote Quotes

#1. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, "grow up and be somebody"? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#2. Training is an active, dynamic process lived out daily in all areas of life- not a rote exercise in memorizing verses and going to church every week.

Craig Groeschel

#3. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America.

Amy Chua

#4. I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

Aleksandar Hemon

#5. It's better not to try to learn all the lines by rote. It's a very bad idea, in fact. You have to do it by using the process, and as I say, the process is to learn during rehearsals, and that's how you'll do it.

Angela Lansbury

#6. I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

Jim Shepard

#7. Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

William Hazlitt

#8. I think there's too much emphasis placed on learning things by rote that you don't really care about. So what happens to students in school is that they eventually lose interest in learning, because they've been forced to learn the required courses, rather than pursing their passion.

Jack Canfield

#9. People doing rote assembly-line movements, or someone tossing dough over and over in a pizza parlour is boring. It's boring to watch and boring to perform. But if you're a bad pizza thrower who drops the dough or watches it stick to the ceiling, then we know something more about your character.

Mark Sutton

#10. Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it's important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.

Twyla Tharp

#11. Considering what he'd been through in the last five days, rote hallucinations would've been a welcome return to sanity.

Blake Crouch

#12. We've each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men's profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that.

Charles Bukowski

#13. A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.
A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.
So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.

William Butler Yeats

#14. I think you're a better comedian when you're in the moment and you're kind of reacting to what's happening like a real person instead of doing rote memorization.

Scott Aukerman

#15. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.

Sylvia Plath

#16. I don't care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How could anyone actually argue about something that could be looked up?

Susan Orlean

#17. When that Aprille with his shoures sote.
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertue engendred is the flour.

Geoffrey Chaucer

#18. The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.

Robert Grudin

#19. At Eton boys are woken at 5 a.m.; lessons begin at 6 a.m. and go on to 8 p.m. Teaching is generally in Latin and is a matter of learning by rote,

Ian Mortimer

#20. Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

Chuck Thompson

#21. And yet, I hope. This cannot continue eternally, can it? Something must someday happen. It is not possible that I should be a permanent fixture here, on the ninth floor of TGK, perpetually repeating the same small and meaningless rituals by rote. Someone

Jeff Lindsay

#22. Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we'd have to learn it in school, we'd to learn the catechism by rote.

Cillian Murphy

#23. Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.

Philip Schultz

#24. I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.

Patrick DeWitt

#25. To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.

John Lancaster Spalding

#26. I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote
first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

Julia Glass

#27. But on those Friday afternoons, ambition did not spread its wings to embrace the study of medicine. We all wanted to be masters like our teachers. Their life appeared to be so enjoyable. All they had to do was learn the lessons set, by heart, and sit and hear boys repeat them by rote.

Austin Clarke

#28. She started life with a number, not a name. Class: S, No. 13295. She has them memorized by rote, though nobody ever calls her that. The Scientists feel foolish addressing her in long, bewildering strings of alphanumerics. They have told her so themselves. To save time, they simply call her Snow.

Nenia Campbell

#29. watching TV and playing solitaire is not a proper life. It's not living. It's killing time, and that's hardly the same. You start asking yourself too many questions when your day is reduced to these rote activities that accomplish nothing. You start to wonder

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#30. If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.

Carl Sagan

#31. Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.

Barbara Kingsolver

#32. She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned.

Michael Chabon

#33. Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information.

Robert M. Pirsig

#34. Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.

Alison Lurie

#35. A man must serve his time to every trade,
Save censure-critics all are ready made.
Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote
With just enough learning to misquote ...

Lord Byron

#36. Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference.

Bill Gates

#37. I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.

P. J. O'Rourke

#38. Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Martin Farquhar Tupper

#39. Ivy gave the woman's hand a firm squeeze before letting it go. "What do you need?" she asked. "We're holding up." That, too, sounded like a rote reply, recited over and over again in hopes that it might somehow become the truth.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#40. Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Laurence Sterne

#41. We can be much, much more than we were taught in teachers college ... more than stern ladies at the front of the room who teach children to recite by rote. We can be, we MUST BE, learning partners, champions, observers, explorers, friends- and , for these special hurt children we need to be family

Jenny Bowen

#42. Wonder Woman isn't Spider-man or Batman. She doesn't have a town, she has a world. That was more interesting to me than a kind of contained, rote superhero franchise.

Joss Whedon

#43. I struggle to learn by rote. I've had meltdowns on set. Which is embarrassing and shameful.

Benedict Cumberbatch

#44. I woke up an hour before I was supposed to, and started going over the mental checklist: where do I go from here, what do I do? I don't remember eating anything at all, just going through the physical, getting into the suit. We practiced that so much, it was all rote.

Alan Shepard

#45. In a lot of teen movies nowadays, you just get the rote six stereotypes like the jock, the cool guy, the nerd, the hot girl, the girl who cares, and the girl who has glasses and is supposed to be ugly but is actually beautiful.

Penn Dayton Badgley

#46. New surroundings have a way of returning attention to areas that may have become rote.

Sara Genn

#47. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.

Susan Sontag

#48. When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

Nicholas Negroponte

#49. Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it.

Tony Buzan

#50. In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Sugata Mitra

#51. His kisses were too rote; they were assembly-line kisses. She wanted complex kisses; she wanted each kiss to be a conversation.

Brian Morton

#52. rather than having it transferred to them through rote memorization or a virtual intravenous tube.

Jonathan E. Finkelstein

#53. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

George Eliot

#54. Don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote,

Richard Feynman

#55. We labor hard for certain but the work is rote and our tomorrows are mostly settled and the way we love one another is cast by the form of our excellent contiguity, a rigorous closeness that only rarely oversteps its bounds.

Chang-rae Lee

#56. Words learn'd by rote a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse, Not more distinct from harmony divine The constant creaking of a country sign.

William Cowper

#57. I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.

Grace Paley

#58. I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

Esperanza Spalding

#59. My music education was oral. I was resistant to scores and things like that. In Jewish religious music, there are no scores. You learn everything by rote, by ear, by repeating.

Charlemagne Palestine

#60. Reciting from rote seems a terrible way to honor the gods and a precise killing of the power of the words.

Thomm Quackenbush

#61. You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

William Landay

#62. Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan
Repeating us by rote:
For him her Old World moulds aside she threw
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new.

James Russell Lowell

#63. We joined a Conservative synagogue. I began learning through engagement, rote and reading. Suddenly, I belonged ... well, to the extent that a novelist can ever feel she is part of a group; we may be part of a minyan, but we're not fully merged into the community.

Susan Isaacs

#64. I'm all through as a human being," she said. "All you're looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I'm just functioning by rote memory.

Haruki Murakami

#65. technologies like payroll processing software, factory automation, computer-controlled machines, automated inventory control, and word processing have been deployed for routine work, substituting for workers in clerical tasks, on the factory floor, and doing rote information processing.

Erik Brynjolfsson

#66. Government schools, with your tax money, now discourage the teaching of multiplication tables by rote memorization but teach reading by the 'look-and-say' method which is memorization of spelling patterns. In doing so, they ensure that children will neither be able to read nor calculate.

Greg Perry

#67. Rote learning is a killer for most of us and for some people, it really excludes them.

Nicholas Negroponte

#68. I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way - by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Richard Feynman

#69. In combat, spontaneity rules; rote performance of technique perishes.

Bruce Lee

#70. Back in those less complicated times, there were lots of industries that operated more or less by rote: the old banker's motto, for instance, was "3-6-3": take money in at 3 percent, lend it out at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 P.M.

Bethany McLean

#71. Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein's brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.

Walter Isaacson

#72. She once used me with that insolence, that in revenge I took her to pieces; sifted her, and separated her failings; I studied 'em, and got 'em by rote. The catalogue was so large, that I was not without hopes, one day or other to hate her heartily.

William Congreve

#73. You wags that judge by rote, and damn by rule.

Thomas Otway

#74. The status quo was rote memorization and recitation in classrooms thronged with passive children who were sternly disciplined when they expressed individual needs.

David Guterson

#75. I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer
not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355]

Kim Edwards