Autodidacts Quotes & Sayings

We needed to be autodidacts; we needed to pass books from hand to hand; we needed to search, and thus be inspired by hard-won effort to create ourselves. We needed to understand that there is power in searching and finding and not having things handed to us. — Kathleen Collins

If someone is responsible, it's me, — Fidel Castro

Your life has purpose as long as you dedicate it to love. It's not what we do but who we are that forms our biggest contribution. — Marianne Williamson

Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters - those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic ... — Miriam Toews

Only the autodidacts are free. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

My mother gave lots of good advice and had a lot to say. As you get older, you realize everything she said was true. — Lenny Kravitz

Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself? — Libba Bray

Werewolf change was never pleasant. That was one of the reasons pack members still referred to it as a curse, despite the fact that, in the modern age of enlightenment and free will, clavigers chose metamorphosis. The change comprised a good deal of biological rearranging. This, like rearranging one's parlor furniture for a party, involved a transition from tidy to very messy to tidy once more. And, as with any redecoration, there was a moment in the middle where it seemed impossible that everything could possibly go back together harmoniously. — Gail Carriger

If you do nothing, you will see nothing. — Victoria Praise Abraham

The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them. — Rachel Cohen

The world of "preserving" that wealth. He had no interest in preservation of any sort. — Michael Lewis

I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu. — Muriel Barbery

And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics. — David Korten

Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong. — Umberto Eco

I'm hypoglycemic, so if I don't eat I start to get really blood-sugar crazy. I feel like I'm going insane. — Reggie Watts

Autodidacts tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor's most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your "deepest ingrained presuppositions," as my own mentor, Karl Kroeber, once wrote, but also about your "most exhilarating new insights, most of which turn out to be fallacious. — William Deresiewicz

Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description. — Charles Stross

Reality is a fragile thing. — Cornelia Funke

For a long time, music was hope. Now it seems music isn't enough to make me happy. It used to be that's all I needed to keep going. Now I need other things to take up the other parts of my life. — Juliana Hatfield