Richard Saul Wurman famous quotes

04-20-2025

The most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Understanding #Able #Essentials
If you serve that God, all the others will be taken care of. My quote is: 'The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.' It is at that moment that you can make something understandable.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Taken #Way #Care
The fundamental failure of most graphic, product, architectural and even urban design is its insistence on serving the God of Looking-Good rather than the God of Being-Good.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Bad Ass #Design #Fundamentals
A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#New York #Average #Weekdays
Order is no guarantee of understanding. Sometimes just the opposite is true.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Order #Opposites #Understanding
Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Library #Information #Facts
The organization of information actually creates new information.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Organization #Information
I am terribly fascinated with things that I donâ€™t understand.
-- Richard Saul Wurman
Most of us do not even know how to ask a question. Most of us do not see the root of the word 'question' is 'quest'. Most of us don't have a quest in our life.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Roots #Quests
People can be motivated to creativity simply with the instruction to "be creative."
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Creativity #People #Creative
Allow the information to tell you how it wants to be displayed. As architecture is â€˜frozen musicâ€™, information architecture is â€˜frozen conversationâ€™. Any good conversation is based on understanding.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Understanding #Want #Information
In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#School #Answers #Asking
What situations can I create that allow me not to have the disease of familiarity?
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Disease #Situation #Familiarity
When I have the choice to do something I don't want to do, I most often â€“ most always â€“ do it anyway.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Choices #Want
My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. Â The big design problem is designing your life.Â It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. Â You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Book #Creativity #Museums
Accept ignorance; pay more attention to the question than the answer; never be afraid to go in the opposite direction.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Ignorance #Opposites #Pay
Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Success #Mother #Home
The key to making things understandable is to understand what itâ€™s like not to understand.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Keys
People never forget things, they just never remembered it in the first place because it was too boring
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#People #Firsts #Never Forget
Learning can be defined as the process of remembering what you are interested in.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Learning #Remember #Process
You only understand information relative to what you already understand.
-- Richard Saul Wurman

#Information #Relative

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