Benjamin Clementine Quotes

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

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.

As you mature, you start reading and studying and researching, you start to really know what life is about.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It's about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

My mom calls me an older soul because, growing up, she taught me stuff real early. Now I spend most of my time chasing wisdom, chasing understanding.

The older you get the more you understand what you're doing.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

I feel like every movie, I've learned more and more about what I think of the world and what I'm trying to figure out.

Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.