Anne Fadiman Quotes

I remember that already as a child I was often intensely interested in things, obsessed by ideas and projects in many areas, and in these topics I learned much on my own, reading books.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.

I like doing scholarship for its own sake.

The limits on your enlightenment come not from the age you stopped going to school but from the age you stopped being curious.

Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.

I'm a good learner. I am fond of reading and educating myself all the time.

I discover a lot of things on my own.

I just was raised always to question and be as informed as I can be.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties. He who easily comprehends all that is before him, and soon exhausts any single subject, is always eager for new inquiries; and in proportion as the intellectual eye takes in a wider prospect, it must be gratified with variety, by more rapid flights and bolder excursions.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

Only the autodidacts are free.

He who leaves school, knowing little, but with a longing for knowledge, will go farther than one who quits, knowing many things, but not caring to learn more.

Stay curious, keep learning and keep growing. And always strive to be more interested than interesting.

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.

I do not much believe in education. Each person ought to be his or her own model, however frightful that may be.

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.