Henry Fielding Quotes

Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation.

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

How can one know anything at all about people?

Going to a party, for me, is as much a learning experience as, you know, sitting in a lecture.

There's more learning than is taught in books.

However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

There are two schools. The school where you go and open a book, and then there's the school of life. When you learn hands-on, often you don't understand why you do what you do and what's the word for that action.

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.

I did go to school - my kind of school. When I was a kid I went out ... and you meet people. You talk to them. Anybody says something that makes sense, it stays with you, rubs off on you. That kind of school.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

In a conversation, keep in mind that you're more interested in what you have to say than anyone else is.

I grew up around people, so I know 'em, and I do like playin' 'em. I'm not religious, but I am kind of a spiritual fanatic, so maybe I understand them in that way.

Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

I suppose the reason why I like acting is because I'm curious about human nature, and the less I know about a character on the page, instinctively, in a way, the better.

Common sense comes from experience, and kids need to fail as well as succeed in order to learn it. It's difficult to develop common sense when you spend a lot of time in your room where nothing much happens.

If you don't understand people, you don't understand business.