George Leonard
George Leonard
George Burr Leonardwas an American writer, editor, and educator who wrote extensively about education and human potential. He was President Emeritus of the Esalen Institute, past-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, President of ITP International, and a former editor of Look Magazine. He was a former United States Army Air Corps pilot, and held a fifth degree black belt in aikido...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionLawyer
Date of Birth3 July 1729
CountryUnited States of America
Keep practicing, even when you seem to be getting nowhere.
Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.
The subtle dance of the body joins us to the world.
What if you're practicing wrong? Then you get very good at doing something wrong.
It's fitting, then, that we begin this exploration of ourselves and of the world with music, and more specifically with a musical quality called vibrato. This pulsation that wells up within the sounded note can lead us to what is most spontaneous and creative in human life, and possibly even to deeper mysteries--to powers of knowing and doing which we have lost or given away during the epoch of civilization, and which perhaps we may now regain.
There is a human striving for self-transcendence. It's part of what makes us human. With all of our flaws we want to go a little bit further than we've gone before and maybe even further than anyone else has gone before.
The more you move in rhythm with someone, the closer you become with that person.
Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.
Practice is the path of mastery.
In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.
At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.
The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty.
Education is... doing anything that changes you.
Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.