Richard Ernst Quotes

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

I think college is an absolute. In this world you have to learn how to learn and get in the habit of always wanting to learn. Some kids have that out of high school and may be able to do the college equivalent of home schooling. Most kids can't. So I highly recommend going to college.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

No one ever taught me and I can't teach anyone. If you can't explain it, how can you take credit for it?

My head was always in books.

My father came from an intellectual and studious avenue as opposed to a brawler's avenue. So I had to go further afield and I brought all kinds of unscrupulous oiks back home - earless, toothless vagabonds - to teach me the arts of the old bagarre.

I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.

There's so much free material on the Internet you can learn from, and some people are pure self-starters: they pick up computers and teach themselves everything. Certainly there are millions of people like that. But at the same time, I think it's a pretty small percentage of the population.

I and my colleagues here have been engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.

We really teach ourselves. If you want to learn, you will always find someone to learn from, be they dead or alive, great or unknown. You learn from everything you see and hear around you - if you are willing to pay attention.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

School seemed unimportant, since I learned so much more on my own.

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

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

On completing my degree, I started a Ph.D. in statistics, although I knew very little about the topic. My supervisor was Professor Harry Pitt, who was an excellent pure mathematician and probabilist.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

If you've found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

I like doing scholarship for its own sake.

To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.

I think a lot of people have grown up with the idea that they can't learn things themselves. They think they need an institution to provide them with knowledge and teach them how to do things. I couldn't disagree more.

By the time I was in my teens, I was reading science fiction. I had this maternal uncle who had cartons of books. It's important to read because you have to fill your head with words.

I am self-educated from genre books.

I remember very well, when I was at Oxford, an old gentleman said to me, "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.