Autodidactism Quotes

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

I just went along with political activists and interested in other intellectual interests which I pursued kind of at random. I never had a real college education. I got a degree, but it was just patching together courses here and there.

Libraries are absolutely at the center of my life. Since I couldn't afford to go to college, I attended the library three or four days a week from the age of eighteen on, and graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.

I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

I quit school in ninth grade, even though I was good at the studies. I knew I didn't need school for what I wanted.

If you can read, you can find books on anything you want. You can self-educate even if you can't afford to go to school.

Everything that we know in the business we've had to learn from mistakes. No one sat us down and taught us or even said, 'Go pick up this book and learn for yourself.' We trusted people.

I don't have a typical filmmaker background. I didn't grow up with a super eight camera or a video camera. I didn't start cutting movies when I was four or five.

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should have the opportunity of teaching itself. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.

What I learned on my own I still remember

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

I started working right away as a kid, so I didn't have a chance to go to improv school or anything like that; I was already a working actor.

The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.

I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.