Christiane Nusslein-Volhard Quotes

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

I've always had better luck learning things on my own. And I really love the challenge of doing it yourself and kind of being alone against the system.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I think a lot of people have grown up with the idea that they can't learn things themselves. They think they need an institution to provide them with knowledge and teach them how to do things. I couldn't disagree more.

My high school didn't really have a good training program, so I did it on my own.

My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.

I discover a lot of things on my own.

Philosophers have long conceded, however, that every man has two educators: 'that which is given to him, and the other that which he gives himself. Of the two kinds the latter is by far the more desirable. Indeed all that is most worthy in man he must work out and conquer for himself. It is that which constitutes our real and best nourishment. What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.

You should be having more fun in high school, exploring things because you want to explore them and learning because you love learning-not worrying about competition.

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.

I had no training in research as such, and as a consequence, I am, in a sense, self-taught.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I'm independent, I'm not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I'm an old-fashioned amateur.

I'm not a trained actor. I'm someone who is autodidactic and learned on my own.

I spent a lot of time star-gazing, writing, and learning languages when the other kids were doing cooler things in Detroit.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

I act because I have to, because I need to find out whether I can do it or not - that's what drives me and excites me and lights me up.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.