Top 180 Ken Robinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I’ve said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don’t make plants grow.”

— Ken Robinson

102. “Often we need other people to help us recognize our real talents. Often we can help other people to discover theirs.”

— Ken Robinson

103. “The first boy said, “I bring you gold.” The second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.” The third boy said, “Frank sent this.”

— Ken Robinson

104. “Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create.”

— Ken Robinson

105. “Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.”

— Ken Robinson

106. “Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it.”

— Ken Robinson

107. “What you’re doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.”

— Ken Robinson

108. “Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.”

— Ken Robinson

109. “Ultimately, the two most important questions to ask yourself in the search for your passion are: what do you love, and what do you love about it?”

— Ken Robinson

110. “Personalization means teachers taking account of these differences in how they teach different students. It also means allowing for flexibility within the curriculum so that in addition to what all students need to learn in common, there are opportunities for them to pursue their individual interests and strengths as well.”

— Ken Robinson

111. “Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.”

— Ken Robinson

112. “Classical education was based on the seven liberal arts or sciences: grammar, the formal structures of language; rhetoric, composition and presentation of argument; dialectic, formal logic; arithmetic; geometry; music; astronomy.14 For centuries, the classics dominated the very idea of being educated and attempts at reform were resisted.”

— Ken Robinson

113. “Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.”

— Ken Robinson

114. “The more alive we feel, the more we can contribute to the lives of others.”

— Ken Robinson

115. “What we become as our lives evolve depends on the quality of our experiences here and now.”

— Ken Robinson

116. “Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture.”

— Ken Robinson

117. “What Einstein seemed to understand is that intellectual growth and creativity come through embracing the dynamic nature of intelligence. Growth comes through analogy, through seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different.”

— Ken Robinson

118. “A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force.”

— Ken Robinson

119. “Many of the opportunities you have in your life are generated by the energy you create around you.”

— Ken Robinson

120. “All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.”

— Ken Robinson

121. “Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents.”

— Ken Robinson

122. “It’s not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude towards what happens. The idea of luck is a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we find our Element.”

— Ken Robinson

123. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

— Ken Robinson

124. “Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.”

— Ken Robinson

125. “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”

— Ken Robinson

126. “Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.”

— Ken Robinson

127. “Because when enough people move, that is a movement. And if the movement has enough energy, that is a revolution. And in education, that’s exactly what we need.”

— Ken Robinson

128. “Many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.”

— Ken Robinson

129. “There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice.”

— Ken Robinson

130. “Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.”

— Ken Robinson

131. “Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.”

— Ken Robinson

132. “All around the world, there are many great schools, wonderful teachers, and inspiring leaders who are working creatively to provide students with the kinds of personalized, compassionate, and community-oriented education they need.”

— Ken Robinson

133. “If you want to change the world,” he said, “who do you begin with, yourself or others? I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.”

— Ken Robinson

134. “Creative teams are dynamic. Diversity of talents is important, but it is not enough. Different ways of thinking can be an obstacle to creativity. Creative teams find ways of using their differences as strengths, not weaknesses.”

— Ken Robinson

135. “All technologies are neutral. What counts is who uses them and what they use them for. Any material, any tool in the hands of an artist, can result in a work of art.”

— Ken Robinson

136. “The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence.”

— Ken Robinson

137. “When you add the noise of the external world to all the roles you take in it, it is easy to lose sight of who you really are. To find your Element, you need to regain that perspective. One way is to create time and space to be alone with yourself, to experience who you are when no one else wants anything from you and the noise has stopped. One method is to meditate.”

— Ken Robinson

138. “Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.”

— Ken Robinson

139. “Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something.”

— Ken Robinson

140. “Learning in and about the arts is essential to intellectual development.”

— Ken Robinson

141. “A person’s native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.”12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training.”

— Ken Robinson

142. “He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it’s not what happens to us that determines out lives – it’s what we make of what happens.”

— Ken Robinson

143. “Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.”

— Ken Robinson

144. “I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.”

— Ken Robinson

145. “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

— Ken Robinson

146. “Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.”

— Ken Robinson

147. “The problem is that too often, and in too many ways, current systems of mass education are a catastrophe in themselves. Far from looking to the future, too often they are facing stubbornly towards the past.”

— Ken Robinson

148. “In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they’re not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.”

— Ken Robinson

149. “To realize our true creative potential – in our organizations, in our schools and in our communities – we need to think differently about ourselves and towards each other. We must learn to be creative.”

— Ken Robinson

150. “Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.”

— Ken Robinson