Autodidact Quotes

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher. ~ Paul Beatty

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence ~ Milan Kundera

The Old Soul is more inclined to be a lifelong learner, constantly feeding his thirst for insight through his own persistent efforts. His learning has not been forced into him through education or learned out of obligation, but has been absorbed out of curiosity and personal choice. ~ Aletheia Luna

For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them. ~ Anthony M. Esolen

I am your original autodidact. ~ Doris Lessing

Until that time I had ascribed the reasons for my cultural eclecticism to my condition as a proletarian autodidact. As I have already explained, I have spent every moment of my existence that could be spared from work in reading, watching films, and listening to music.
Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 2008 ~ Muriel Barbery

On some intuitive level, I knew that learning had to be more than the mastery of facts. I've experienced it as an adult. I become consumed with a subject like quilting or preparing yogurt cultures, and that topic takes over my life - fabric scraps scattered on the floor, little jars of white sludge cuddled by blankets on my kitchen countertops. When I learned to play guitar in my thirties, no one had to schedule my practices. My guitar lived on a stand in the living room and I tormented our ears multiple times a day until my fingers bled. Passion for learning has that fiery, consuming, can't-stop quality. ~ Julie Bogart

I read a lot, that's my main hobby. I've got an iPad which I store books on and I read voraciously. I'm a slow reader but I'm obsessive. I make references, underline things, cross-reference. I'm an autodidact. ~ Anthony Hopkins

This is the terrible thing about learning everything from books - sometimes you don't know how to say the words. You know the ideas, but you cannot discuss them with people with any confidence. And so you stay silent. It is the curse of the autodidact. Or "autodidiact," as I said, on the same shameful day. Oh, that was a conversation that went so wrong. ~ Caitlin Moran

Only the autodidacts are free. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things. ~ Dean Koontz

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself. ~ Alan Moore

I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, ~ Stanisław Lem

I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact. ~ Agnes Varda

Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact. ~ James Ellroy

Mason was a first-rate spatial voyeur, an autodidact of architectural exteriors. ~ Geoff Manaugh

I don't take acting classes - I'm quite an autodidact. I prefer to learn from other actors by watching various movies. Evaluate my acting, spot the flaws and fix them. ~ Joe Taslim

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go. ~ Kate Atkinson