David Baker Quotes

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.'

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

Long experience has taught me not always to believe in the limitations indicated by purely theoretical considerations. These, as we well know, are based on insufficient knowledge of all the relevant factors.

But isn't the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around - walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing.

I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain.

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

Life is so unlike theory.

A theory must be tempered with reality.

My 'work' is about seeing not about ideas.

Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.

You can do all the film school you want in classrooms, but if you are on the set, you are going to learn so much more because you are really in the middle of doing it.

I need more raw experience. I've read and watched a lot of things, but I haven't done a lot of things.

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

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

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

Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.

He that in the ordinary affairs of life would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration would be sure of nothing in this world but of perishing quickly.

Only practical work and experience lead the young to maturity.

But principles defended at the expense of pragmatic application is the business of priests.

My formal education as an extension to my college degree in journalism was the time that I spent working with the student newspaper. I would argue that my greatest education occurred by working for the student newspaper. It wasn't necessarily the classroom work that made my formal education special. It was the idea that I had the opportunity to practice it before I went into the real world.

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

For not all things are practicable on identical principles

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

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