Will Durant Quotes

Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.

I've always had better luck learning things on my own. And I really love the challenge of doing it yourself and kind of being alone against the system.

The highest culture is not obtained from the teacher when at school or college, so much as by our ever diligent self-education when we become men.

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.

Everyone's gotta make their own way.

I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself - the working-class tradition of self-education.

For me, my life is a journey.

I have a lot of fun writing for artists, but I'm learning to apply that fun to myself.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

I don't think I'd change the path that's got me where I am today.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

I soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

The older you get, the more you fight for your own identity and start to live your own life.

My life choices are not supposed to be the gateway to somebody else's. That's my journey.

Everyone has their own path in life, no matter if it's being a celebrity or a singer. Quite frankly, I didn't move to Nashville and tell myself I wanted to be a singer because I wanted to be a celebrity or I wanted to be somebody that people admired. I wasn't about that. I just loved music.

I learn much more by traveling by myself.

I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I am your original autodidact.

I always say that failure was my friend. I learned nothing at school, so I just lived in my own world.

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.