Quotes from My Ishmael

Daniel Quinn ·  288 pages

Rating: (8.4K votes)


“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot
make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot — a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael



“What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael



“No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.
Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


“A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from My Ishmael


About the author

Daniel Quinn
Born place: in Omaha, Nebraska, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes


“I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality


“You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Making Money


“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Chess Story


“The boy who’d saved her from drowning in more ways than one.”
― Stephanie Garber, quote from Caraval


Interesting books

Dark Matter
(120.5K)
Dark Matter
by Blake Crouch
Ash
(26.3K)
Ash
by Malinda Lo
Jasper Jones
(20.3K)
Jasper Jones
by Craig Silvey
I Heart You, You Haunt Me
(12.5K)
I Heart You, You Hau...
by Lisa Schroeder
Last Breath
(22.4K)
Last Breath
by Rachel Caine
The City and the Stars
(22.6K)
The City and the Sta...
by Arthur C. Clarke

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.