"Learning without thinking is useless; thinking without learning is dangerous" - Confucius
The first part is what I have a real problem with. How is this true? What does he mean by this?
2007-01-31 11:44:44 · 4 answers · asked by justin 2 in Education & Reference ➔ Quotations
I think the sentence you are talking about, the better translation should be "To learn without thinking, one will be lost in his learning. To think without learning, one will be imperilled."
To learn without thinking means one is very unlikely to apply such knowledge, thus will feel very lost in his learning. Because one does not know what he/she is learning anyway. And by thinking, one can learn more related things as well.
To think without learning is more dangerous. Let me give an example. If you think that as long as you buy a stock, you will earn, than you are in danger of losing your savings because you never learn what are the mechanics behind that allow one to earn when he/she buy stocks. That is thinking without learning.
Hope it helps! Cheers!
2007-01-31 14:07:38 · answer #1 · answered by efmkoo 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Learning without thinking is useless means that if you learn lots of stuff but never use it learning it was kind of a waist of time.
Like lets say you learn all about medicine and become a doctor. then there are sick people around and you do nothing to figure out what is wrong with them or cure them then what was the point of going to school to be a doctor.
thinking without learning is dangerous means if you start making decisions without first getting educated you will probably make the wrong ones. This can lead to very bad things depending on the situation.
Lets say you never went to school to be a doctor and there are sick people around. So you are like medicine makes people better so you convince them to take drugs but since you never learned what they do instead of sick people you have dead people because you gave them the wrong drugs.
2007-01-31 22:07:54 · answer #2 · answered by thatoneguy 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Learning without thinking is useless .... merely memorizing something is not helpful. You need to think about it to truly learn it.
2007-01-31 20:45:23 · answer #3 · answered by istitch2 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Most of what confucius says, he didn't.
2007-02-04 19:00:01 · answer #4 · answered by pilot 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋