Polybius Quotes

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

In life, you know, they do this in focus groups; if you were in such and such circumstance, what would you do? Well, you never know what you're going do unless you're faced with it.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

You have to think about what you want to do. There is nothing to say that you should study from the age of 20 to 23. I learnt more on a film set at 17 than in the classroom.

It's true that the best way of knowing yourself is to put yourself into different situations.

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

There's no such thing as a normal life. Some lives are just more interesting than others, and we shouldn't judge people for being boring.

I seek a diverse spectrum of roles. If I just was in a large-budget feature for a younger audience, then I want to find a smaller, more character-driven piece that might be for a more mature audience. Or if I'm playing a goofier character, then maybe I want to go play a serious, psychopathic character. But at the same time, it's usually a case-by-case basis where I'm judging the merit of a role by the script I'm given, and it usually has less to do with the larger framework and more to do with how the part personally appeals to me in that moment.

It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

If you don't live it, you don't believe it.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.

A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

Cook more often. Don't study; just cook.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation from life.