Benjamin Hoff Quotes

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

If you read books forever and ever, they will never replace what really counts - that's practical experience.

You can read about it all you want, but there is no substitute for just doing it.

I believe without exception that theory follows practice. Whenever there is a conflict between theory and practice, theory is wrong. As far as I'm concerned, we make theories for what people have done.

I have no schooling in any normal sense but have learned from the best as far as just doing things. I learned filmmaking from loving movies and then just saying, 'OK, let's do it.'

The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.

Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training.

The best preparation for work is not thinking about work, talking about work or studying for work. It is work.

There's a lot of things you can't learn unless you actually experience it.

We learn to do by doing.

One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

We were taught instead of just reading about life we needed to go out and live it.

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

Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit.

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare. A person who has had no opportunity to go to school can also learn warfare — he can learn through fighting in a war.

You must know the difference between imagination, theoretical knowledge and true realization. Could you nourish yourself by only listening to a talk on food? To know food only theoretically is to always remain hungry. You must eat to satisfy hunger. So he who seeks new doctrines continuously but does not put them into practice in his life is in continual spiritual starvation.

Knowledge gained through experience is far superior and many times more useful than bookish knowledge.

Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.

Only ... from personal experience [can a man] take the necessary measures without a preliminary process of trial and error.

A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.