Wenger Quotes

When you give success to stupid people, it makes them more stupid sometimes and not more intelligent.

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art.

As Arsène Wenger famously said – “To achieve great things you have first to believe it.

Passing the ball is communicating with another person; it’s being in the service of another person. It’s crucial. For the pass to be a good one, the player has to put himself in the position of the person who’s going to receive it. It’s an act of intelligence and generosity, what I call technical empathy.

For us it is not comparable, the FA Cup and Champions League,’ Arsène Wenger said before Arsenal played Leeds in the FA Cup. ‘The Champions League is compulsory. The FA Cup is something that is for enjoyment … The basis of our life at the top level is dictated by the championship. If we can add on top of that the FA Cup it is fantastic.

When God passed out patience, I was too impatient to wait in line.

No matter how much money you earn, you can only eat three meals a day and sleep in one bed

But first, I had to eat my piece of Wacky Cake.

The sheer act of persistently expressing our thoughts on some subject causes us to learn more about that subject, even when no new information has been provided from without.

The coach's role is to make the player understand everything that serves the interest of the game. To do this he must speak to the child within each player, to the adolescent he was & to the adult he is

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

The opposite of fragmentation is not homogenization, which is a suspicious form of unity. Who wants blending, anyway? And for what purpose? Blending, somehow, always ends up privileging the perspective of the blade.

Whenever you write down a perception or an idea, you reinforce the behavior of being perceptive or creative. Whenever you fail to describe or record such insights, you reinforce the behavior of being unperceptive and uncreative. Simple, isn’t it?

What matters, I think, is that you retain your childlike soul and never lose sight of your dreams: What are they, what do you need technically to make them come true? Discard any negative ideas that might prevent you from getting there, and above all, commit completely.

I remember that nobody taught me to dance: You learned by asking a girl, by throwing yourself into it, by forgetting to be afraid. Like swimming. There was no swimming teacher like there is today, either: Somebody would throw you in the water and you just had to figure it out for yourself.

A year before Wenger’s appointment, Leyton Orient manager John Sitton had been the subject of a Channel 4 documentary that recorded him threatening to fight his own players in a famously bizarre dressing-room outburst. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here,’ he roared at two players. ‘All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, ’coz by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.’ That was the 1990s football manager.

Of course, to be a good football player, technique does matter, and that’s something you acquire when you’re between seven and twelve, but it’s not enough on its own: Not being afraid, knowing how to take the initiative, being resilient, reliable, showing solidarity, being a bit crazy, having one hell of a passion—

Meaningful learning in a community requires both participation and reification to be present and in interplay. Sharing artifacts without engaging in discussions and activities around them impairs the ability to negotiate the meaning of what is being shared. Interacting without producing artifacts makes learning depend on individual interpretation and memory and can limit its depth, extent, and impact. Both participation and reification are necessary. Sometimes one process may dominate the other, or the two processes may not be well integrated. The challenge of this polarity is for communities to successfully cycle between the two.

This is where the music starts to slow. Because, let’s face it, the fact remains that in two decades since his arrival Wenger has had a greater, more visible – albeit rather tenuous – influence on Germany’s world champions than he has on the current England team. Despite being the only long-serving Premier League-era manager with any real sway or heft in the wider world – coach of five of France’s world champions in 1998 – he will leave no real mark on English football development or theory. Rather than cherished, brain selectively picked, Wenger is instead quietly mocked these days, cast as a cobwebbed crank, some doomed, sad stone knight still tending the hearth, a little creaky and mad, friends only with the flies and the beetles and the spiders.

Wenger’s boundary-crossers may be networked individuals who move beyond and between closed communities, cross-fertilizing each community with ideas and practices of others.

Dixon was personally grateful to be educated by the contrasting methods of George Graham and Arsène Wenger. One instilled the basics of defensive discipline. The other inspired freedom of expression on the field.

The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid. Arsene Wenger

You care for each other. There's a love for another. People don't want to use that word, but I thought Wenger set that influence. Because you get some managers who would trust you, they've all got good knowledge, but not all of them care for you. But he cared in such a way that you gave more for him. He spread that. He certainly spread that to me. I felt that I was being more caring, or more helpful towards other people because of what he did. I felt that habit and behaviour came from the boss.

You care for each other. There's a love for one another. People don't want to use that word, but I thought that Wenger set that influence. Because you get some managers who would trust you, they've all got good knowledge, but not all of them care for you. But he cared in such a way that you gave more for him. He spread that. He certainly spread that to me. I felt I was being more caring, or more helpful towards other people because of what he did. I felt that habit and behaviour came from the boss. - Martin Keown

Having no jerseys was invaluable because it forced us to look up and develop our peripheral vision, to acquire vision that was deeper. Having no coach, when young, was also invaluable for allowing us to develop a game based on taking initiative. Have we perhaps fallen into the opposite extreme today?

I think about a story told by a Serbian player I very much admired. He must have lived in a village that was like mine but even poorer, far from everything, lost in the Yugoslavian countryside. When he was small, his uncle had given him a fabulous, shiny-white new ball. In order not to spoil it, he and his brother decided never to let it bounce on the ground and play only with their heads. There was only one ball, and they had to make it last. During one match, a coach from Red Star Belgrade spotted him. He was recruited thanks to the skills he had developed playing with his head in this way. What sort of player would he have been if he’d had access to twenty balls? Not spoiling the ball he was given, playing all the time, developing his own qualities through perseverance and training: I liked everything about this story. The white ball was sacred to me, too, and it remains so to this day. That was the kind of football I came from.

Learning is the engine of practice, and practice is the history of that learning.

Our knowing - even of the most unexceptional kind - is always too big, too rich, too an cient, and too connected for us to be the source of it individually. At the same time, our knowing - even of the most elevated kind - is too en gaged, too precise, too tailored, too active, and too experiential for it to be just of a generic size. The experience of knowing is no less unique, no less creative, and no less extraordinary for being one of participa tion. As a matter of fact, on the face of it, it would probably not amount to much otherwise.

Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.

If he had merely balanced his transfer budget in that period, let alone made a profit as Wenger did, he could have raised his team’s salaries by $36 million a year.

I look at all these changes and I think about them, and yet I always see football for what it is and what it should be: a match where anything can happen; the players; ninety minutes; fantastic moves; an element of luck, talent, courage, a touch of magic; and, for those who are watching these men play, the search for excitement, for a memory, for a lesson in life.

Learning to love God is all about learning to trust God… Even if we have faith that ultimately the love of God will win over all that is loveless, inhumane, life-destroying, and fouled up, any honest talk about God will need to contend with betrayal, failure, disappointment, and defeat. Faith, and the language we use to describe faith, will be worth learning only if it is forged in a fire that burns out all that is false and dehumanizing; a fire that requires honest reckoning with suffering, sin, and evil.

And so I come somewhat trembling to this … book project – because what I offer may sound like an unfair critique. I believe, even so, that I, and every one of us, should reflect on the language we reflexively use in order to become more aware of words and phrases that sound out of touch with reality, maybe misunderstood, or worse, maybe dishonest and even harmful.

Within a flattened world, we give ourselves to activism or business or family life or fantasy without any expectation of divine intervention. We rarely take time to imagine with our children or grandchildren how we might listen for God, respond to God’s call to action, anticipate God’s intervention, or give ourselves in service to the shalom vision of God for the world.

When we dare to learn how to pray and how to talk about the ways in which God has shown up in our lives, there’s a kind of grace that infuses the most ordinary moments of our lives – both personal and familial, and in our circle of friends or church. We don’t get there quickly – without a lot of stumbling, awkward moments, and regrets – but that’s what learning the art of talking about faith requires. Practice. It takes practice to learn how to be genuine and natural; to speak about when we’ve sensed the Spirit’s prompting, or felt convicted of dishonesty, or encouraged to be more courageous, or experienced something that defied explanation – something miraculous. We can learn to be truth-tellers – testifying in honest, authentic ways about what we’ve observed of God’s activity in the mundane and in the more spectacular events of our lives.

That summer, two of Wenger’s French boys went off to join their national team at the 1998 World Cup in their home country. Les Bleus marauded their way to the final, where they overpowered Brazil, 3–0. The final goal was swept in by Petit and assisted by Vieira. In London the next morning, the front page of the Mirror carried a photo of those two players locked in a hug beside a headline that showed just how much their stodgy old London club—and English soccer—were changing. ARSENAL WIN THE WORLD CUP, it read.

The learning process inherently includes the development of identity. In his book on communities of learners, Étienne Wenger (1998) explains, “Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience of identity. It is not just an accumulation of skills and information but a process of becoming—to become a certain person or, conversely, to avoid becoming a certain person. Even the learning that we do entirely by ourselves contributes to making us into a specific kind of person. We accumulate skills and information, not in the abstract as ends in themselves, but in the service of an identity.

Like the stonemasons we encountered in Wenger’s story in chapter 5, we Christian teachers sometimes have to be reminded, amid the workaday pressures of class prep and grading, that we are building cathedrals. One of the most important practices we can undertake as Christian educators is to cultivate time and space to renarrate to one another just what we’re doing together.

we need a different learning theory for the twenty-first century – and it will have to be a social learning theory. We need to learn to live together on a small planet, where we don’t know what’s going to happen next and where the survival of our species appears to be at stake.

Many of my proposals are aimed at freeing humans so they can discover and pursue their personal interests and purpose, while existing education and job loop systems stand in opposition to this freedom.

We need others to complement and develop our own expertise. This collective character of knowledge does not mean that individuals don’t count. In fact, the best communities welcome strong personalities and encourage disagreements and debates. Controversy is part of what makes a community vital, effective, and productive.

communities of practice are a practical way to frame the task of managing knowledge. They provide a concrete organizational infrastructure for realizing the dream of a learning organization.

Walking to the front

Among the many benefits of Socratic Method is that it causes students to reach their own insights and express them in their own words.

what is expressed by the learner is a hundred times more productive learning than what is expressed to the learner

Whatever explanation you prefer, men and women have for thousands of years been sharing their bodies with other beings, real or imagined. There is overwhelming documentation that, while engaged in such trances, people exhibit skills, talents, knowledge, and even physical strength and dexterity unavailable to them in their normal lives.

If you take short breaths, you will tend to have short bursts of attention and to speak in short sentences. Deep, full breaths will enable you to speak in longer, more complex sentences and to form deeper thoughts. Underwater swimming is the best remedy for over-short breath.

every one of us has a constant stream of images going through our heads, which we usually don’t even notice

10 to 15 minutes of Image Streaming per day will actually build your intelligence by reinforcing bridges of communication between the different poles of your brain

Ultimately, you will learn to consult your greater resources so easily and quickly that you will be able to do so as quickly as an eye blink in the middle of a conversation, with no one else noticing.

those tribes whose infants creep and crawl tend to have more complex societies, higher technology, and some form of written language. Most tribes that restrict their infants from crawling have no writing of their own and can be taught to read only with great difficulty.

they think the image must remain in their conscious view the whole time they’re describing it. Not so. Even if the image flickers for a second and disappears, you can still keep describing it from memory, just as you described the Taj Mahal.

Pause before making your next big decision. Look around and notice the slight irregularities of the ceiling, the texture of brick underfoot, the feel of your knee bending and straightening, and the slight shifts of sensation in your shoulders, stomach, neck, and face. You can’t really explain why, but when you widen your neurological contact with the world in this way you feel stronger, wiser, and more creative—and you choose more wisely.

it would be well worth your time to start keeping a codebook, listing all the objects, people, and situations that seem to recur in your Image Streams together with what you think they might mean

it is psychologically impossible to describe a person or object from memory without first forming a mental image of it

Next identify the key trigger words, that is, words that jump out at you as you scan the book. The author uses them again and again because they represent key facets of the book’s theme. In The Einstein Factor, such terms as “Image Streaming,” “Squelcher,” and “Feedback Loop” will have jumped out at you. Find out precisely what the trigger words mean, and you will understand the book.

Sometimes people escape from childhood traumas by splitting into a whole spectrum of different, fully functioning identities, a condition known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). So distinct are these personalities that MPD victims will have not only different handwriting styles, artistic talents, and knowledge of foreign languages, but even different allergies, illnesses, and reactions to drugs, depending upon which personality they are “using” at the moment.

one teenage girl who, during a lucid dream, “entered the body” of a boy whose attention she had been soliciting in vain. Once inside her love object’s “body,” she began to see things from his point of view. “I understood why he had been so reserved with me,” she reported, “and I realized that he would never return my feelings.” As a result, the girl was able to end a fruitless and disheartening infatuation.

Each night before falling asleep, Hill would close his eyes and imagine himself to be in the company of nine “invisible counselors” modeled after his nine greatest heroes: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Luther Burbank, Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie.

The need to express ourselves at all costs is hard-wired into our brains as deeply as our drive for food or sex.

According to Arsène Wenger (current manager of Arsenal football club), “the biggest difficulty you have in this job is not to motivate the players but to get them relaxed enough to express their talent