Sameh

“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.”
― Jean Piaget, Play and Development

“When my grandmother—may she attain the Kingdom of Heaven—was dying, my mother, as was then the custom, took me to her bedside and, as I kissed her right hand, my dear grandmother placed her dying left hand on my head and said in a whisper, yet very distinctly: “Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do.” Having said this, she gazed at the bridge of my nose and, evidently noticing my perplexity and my obscure understanding of what she had said, added somewhat angrily and imperiously: “Either do nothing—just go to school—or do something nobody else does Whereupon she immediately, without hesitation and with a perceptible impulse of disdain for all around her, and with commendable self-cognizance, gave up her soul directly into the hands of His Faithfulness, the Archangel Gabriel.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

“Never will he understand the sufferings of another, who has not experienced them himself, though he have divine Reason and the nature of a genuine devil!”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche