Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Gina Barreca

Quote by Gina Barreca

“Here’s the nice thing about being over 60: You know enough to know you don’t know everything, however much you’ve learned.”

Quote by Gina Barreca

Create image

Author

Gina Barreca
Gina Barreca

Gina Barreca is a renowned American professor, born in 1957. Her academic contributions are primarily focused on women's studies, literary criticism, and cultural theory. more

You May Also Like

“It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different constructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course - to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment. If we ask whose ideas were the seeds of the dominant ethic and shared hopes of contemporary humanity, whose resulted in the most material advancement in history, whose were the first of their kind and today enjoy the most emulation, then in that sense the Enlightenment, despite the erosion of its original vision and despite the shakiness of some of its premises, has been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world.”

GrowthKnowledgeLearningEnlightenmentUnitySeminality
Book:Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Create image

“Everyone has a unique story. […] Learning these stories will inevitably enrich your life. It might even lengthen it. Curiosity, it turns out, is conducive to health and happiness, as scores of social scientists have documented. Curious people, not surprisingly, are likely to learn more and to retain more of what they learn. Curious people are likely to be more attractive to others, as people are attracted to those who seem interested in them. Curiosity also leads to empathy, an emotion that seems in short supply today. Curious people are likely to be healthier, and to experience less anxiety in particular, because they see new situations as an opportunity to learn rather than an opportunity to realize that they don’t know enough. Curious people are also, according to some studies, likely to live longer, presumably because they are more engaged with the world around them.”

LifeStoriesLearningCuriosity
Book:Wait, What?: And Life's Other Essential Questions
Create image