Self Educated Quotes & Sayings

You may dazzle the mind with a thousand brilliant discoveries of natural science; you may open new worlds of knowledge which were never dreamed of before; yet, if you have not developed in the soul of the pupil strong habits of virtue which will sustain her in the struggle of life, you have not educated her, but only put in her hand a powerful instrument of self-destruction. — Rose Philippine Duchesne

The story of Carol's transformation evoked complicated feelings in Rose. It appalled her, of course. The idea of an educated, metropolitan woman voluntarily casting off every vestige of modernity in order to make herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller was unconscionable - but it also inspired a sneaking envy. By submitting to the restraints of Orthodoxy, Carol had not only performed an impressive act of self-denial - an act guaranteed to appeal to Rosa's ascetic sensibility - but also freed herself from the burden of trying to improvise her own moral code. These days, she always knew what the right thing to do was - or if she didn't, she knew a rabbi who did. Every aspect of her daily life was consonant with her convictions. — Zoe Heller

Harris had the egotistical dogmatism of the self-made man who had painfully educated himself without contact with superior brains. — Beatrice Webb

Anyone can be self-educated if they find the loose end of something to care about passionately. — Francis Spufford

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat. — Hanif Kureishi

Many things in your life matter, but only one thing matters absolutely.It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matter whether you are rich or poor - it certainly makes a difference in your life. Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking, but they don't matter absolutely.There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self. — Eckhart Tolle

The truly educated can listen to any view without losing their temper or self-confidence. — Robert Frost

In choosing not to be a beast, I discovered my humanity. I became autodidactic, self-educated - a critical thinker. — Stanley Williams

To whom should we listen? The loudest voices? The most educated? The formerly marginalized? The formerly powerful? Those with the most retweets? Those who have traditionally spoken for God are now looked at askance by many people, and with good reason. Too often they've used their Christian platform for political and military gain. They've forgotten that the story of God, exemplified in Jesus, is an abdication of power. It's a story of self-limitation and humility. It's a story lived in solidarity with those at the margins. To whom should we listen? To Jesus on the cross. — Tony Jones

There are obvious psychological stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation. Most higher primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are few examples of individuals surviving outside of a group. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit situation that humans evolved for into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, and people sleep alone or with a partner. Even if he or she is in a family, that is not the same as belonging to a large, self-sufficient group that shares and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individual lifestyles that those technologies spawn may be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit. — Jonathan Franzen

Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being. — Richard Ebeling

One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians. — John Hawkes

Michael Faraday, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, was born in south London in 1791. He was self-educated, leaving school at fourteen to become an apprentice bookbinder. He engineered his own lucky break into the world of professional science after attending a lecture in London by the Cornish scientist Sir Humphry Davy in 1811. Faraday sent the notes he had taken at the lecture to Davy, who was so impressed by Faraday's diligent transcription that he appointed him his scientific assistant. Faraday went on to become a giant of nineteenth-century science, widely acknowledged to have been one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. Davy is quoted as saying that Faraday was his greatest scientific discovery. — Brian Cox

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Last evening attended Croghan Lodge International Order of Odd Fellows. Election of officers. Chosen Noble Grand. These social organizations have a number of good results. All who attend are educated in self-government. This in a marked way. They bind society together. The well-to-do and the poor should be brought together as much as possible. The separation into classes
castes
is our danger. It is the danger of all civilizations. — Rutherford B. Hayes

I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture. — H.G.Wells

None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The good reporters of that era, those who were well educated and who were enlightened themselves and worked for enlightened organizations, liked the Kennedys and were for the same things the Kennedys were for. In addition, the particular nature of the President's personal style, his ease and confidence with reporters, his considerable skill in utilizing television, and the terrible manner in which he was killed had created a remarkable myth about him. The fact that a number of men in his Cabinet were skillful writers themselves and that in the profound sadness after his murder they wrote their own eloquent (and on occasion self-serving) versions of his presidency had strengthened that myth. — David Halberstam

To become self-educated you should condemn yourself for all those things that you would criticize others. — Diogenes

(Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.) Nor has AIDS become so publicized because, as some have suggested, in rich countries the illness first afflicted a group of people who were all men, almost all white, many of them educated, articulate, and knowledgeable about how to lobby and organize for public attention and resources devoted to the disease. AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. What — Susan Sontag

I was a normal eighteen-year-old: shuttered, self-conscious, untravelled and sneering; violently educated, socially crass, emotionally blurting. — Julian Barnes

white middle-upper class guys in highly educated families have a unique burden placed on us to be the hero of every story that we tell. I don't think it's merely that we're self-centered and arrogant, but that we feel like we're supposed to be in charge, and if we're not the hero of the story, we've somehow failed in our life duty.group — Morgan Guyton

An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite. — Thornton Wilder

I dropped out of college and I'm pretty much a self-educated person, so a lot of my core belief system comes from life. — Lizz Winstead

Is this not pathetic, Odd, what some ill-educated fool has done? I take solace in reminding myself that 'art is long and critics are the insects of a day.'" "Shakespeare?" I asked. "No. Randall Jarrell. A wonderful poet, now all but forgotten because modern universities teach nothing but self-esteem and toe-sucking. — Dean Koontz

Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves. — Erich Fromm

INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. This is a handicap that may be overcome with comparative ease. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as 'self-made' or self-educated. It takes more than a university degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated has learned to get whatever they want in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently applied. People are paid not merely for what they know, but more particularly for what they do with what they know. — Napoleon Hill

Literate, affluent, self-confident people do not like living under either dictatorship or chaos. As more nations move into modernity and find themselves populated with educated, competent citizens, leaders will find it harder to govern those citizens without providing them the democratic rights that they are going to insist on anyway. — Oliver H. Woshinsky

Iranians hate Arabs. They're a fairly well-educated population and they have centuries of experience with self-government. — Michael Ledeen

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascinationfor all educated Americans. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities. — Isaac D'Israeli

Like other self-educated men, he was vain of his vocabulary. — Ross Macdonald

A properly educated leader, especially when harassed and under pressure, will know from his study of history and the classics that circumstances very much like those he is encountering have occurred from time to time on this earth since the beginning of history. He will avoid the self-indulgent error of seeing himself in a predicament so unprecedented, so unique, as to justify his making an exception to law, custom or morality in favor of himself. The making of such exceptions has been the theme of public life throughout much of our lifetimes. For twenty years, we've been surrounded by gamesmen unable to cope with the wisdom of the ages. They make exceptions to law and custom in favor of themselves because they choose to view ordinary dilemmas as unprecedented crises. — James B. Stockdale

...like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it,... — W. Somerset Maugham

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality
a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self
evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.' — Richard Foreman

Only self-educated is educated. Others are merely taught. — Erno Paasilinna

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact ... That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is ... Evolution is the only game in town, the greatest show on earth. — Richard Dawkins

Ignorance is the mother of all the evil and all the misery we see. Let men have light, let them be pure and spiritually strong and educated, then alone will misery cease in the world, not before. We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man's character changes. — Swami Vivekananda

It is under all circumstances an advantage to be in full possession of one's personality, otherwise the repressed elements will only crop up as a hindrance elsewhere, not just at some unimportant point, but at the very spot where we are most sensitive. If people can be educated to see the shadow-side of their nature clearly, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more self-knowledge can only have good results in respect for our neighbor; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. — C. G. Jung

I'm self-made. I always wanted to make myself a better person, because I was not educated. But that was my dream - to have class. — Tina Turner

One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated. — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

Those who are fortunate to be educated, must light the flame of fire. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Love of learning will never let you down. You can have a quest for money, you can have a quest for power, you can have a quest for fame and they are sometimes gratifying and sometimes self-destructive. The love of learning is always gratifying and never self-destructive. The more educated, the more cultivated a society becomes, better off is everybody. — David McCullough

Why did I stay? My self-esteem was ruined for a very long time. I was socially isolated from my family and friends. I kept everything that was going on in my marriage a secret. I feared for my safety if I left him. I was financially dependent on my spouse. I am an educated woman who was working towards a master's degree when I met him. He persuaded me to stop school after the birth of our first son. Eventually, he trapped me in his web of lies. I believe I suffered from Stockholm syndrome for many years. It isn't easy to leave. Unless you have lived in an abusive relationship, a typical person wouldn't understand. It seems perfectly logical to an outsider that it would be easy to leave an abusive relationship. It truly isn't and walking away is terrifying for a victim. No one deserves to live his or her life as a prisoner. Love shouldn't hurt and abuse is not love. - Mary Laumbach-Perez — Bree Bonchay

To live with integrity, it is important to know what's right and what's wrong, to be educated morally. However, merely KNOWING is not enough. Virtuous character matters more than moral knowledge. The reason is simple: like the self-confessing apostle Paul in Romans 7, most of those who do wrong know what's right but find themselves irresistibly attracted to its opposite. Faith idles when character shrivels — Miroslav Volf

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized! — Mark Twain

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in. — David Brooks

Whether one is formally educated or self educated; the cornerstone of success is education. — Will Foster

Man, as a purely natural creature, fairly educated, but wholly unspiritualized, is a mental composition of: Hunger, Curiosity, Self-Esteem, Avarice, Cowardice, Lust, Cruelty, Personal Ambition; and on these vile qualities alone our 'society' hangs together; the virtues have no place anywhere, and do not count at all, save as conveniently pious metaphors. — Marie Corelli

Ozzie Boone ... insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow.
By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries. — Dean Koontz

Self belief is just one of the reasons we're younger and looking better today. We're also better educated. We know more about the environment and how it impacts on us, we understand more about nutrition and diet, and how it can affect our health too. We're also aware that what we think can affect us and so we try to think positively. — Deborra-Lee Furness

An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens. — Thomas Jefferson

But the young educated adults of the 90s
who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully
got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself. — David Foster Wallace

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist. — Dean Koontz

As they left the pier and walked into the park, Chahda looked around appreciatively. "Nice place, this. Capital of New Caledonia. Big island, has 8,548 square mile, also has 53,245 peoples. Eleven thousand in Noumea. That is what says the Worrold Alm-in-ack."

Rick and Scotty laughed. It was like old times to hear Chahda quoting from The World Almanac. A Bombay beggar boy, he had educated himself with only the Almanac for his textbook, and he had laboriously memorized everything in it. — John Blaine

For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. — Henry Adams

The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars. — G.K. Chesterton

I am self-educated from genre books. — Charlaine Harris

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant. — John Banville

I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell. — Peter Ackroyd

Right knowledge, of itself, EVIDENTLY does not bring about moral transformation in human beings - even supposing that right knowledge is something we are predisposed to desire in the first place. It is possible to be highly educated and at the same time morally depraved. There is, in fact, a certain kind of moral depravity that only the highly educated can attain, because it requires sophisticated skills of rationalization and self-deception. — Iain W. Provan

There's something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It's a difficult balance. And here is where these ruminations about writing touch on morality. The same constraints to writing well are also constraints to living fully. Not to be a slave to fashion or commerce, not to succumb to arid self-censorship, not to bow to popular opinion - what is all that but a description of the educated, enlightened life? — Jeffrey Eugenides

Speak as educated nature suggests to you, and you will do well, but let it be educated and not raw, rude, uncultivated nature. Demosthenes took unbounded pains with his voice, and Cicero, who was naturally weak, made a long journey into Greece to correct his manner of speaking. With far nobler themes, let us not be less ambitious to excel. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus. — Lesslie Newbigin