If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks. Michael Crichton
About This Quote

The more you learn about the natural world, the more you realize how little you know. The image of nature as a beautiful but mysterious place has been widely used to describe the natural world. However, this quote is actually describing the opposite of what was meant. Nelson Mandela goes on to say that nature can teach us about not just beauty, but also about how things work, why they work that way, and even its own forcefulness or ruthlessness. This quote can also be interpreted as saying that you can’t know everything there is to know about life (or your school subject) by simply reading a book.

Source: Micro

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