Studs Terkel Quotes

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

There is a certain amount you can learn from reading, but you also need to see and experience things.

There are two schools. The school where you go and open a book, and then there's the school of life. When you learn hands-on, often you don't understand why you do what you do and what's the word for that action.

You can read and read, but nothing eclipses experience.

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

There's more learning than is taught in books.

Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.

What is learned in high school, or for that matter anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place.

All genuine education comes about through experience.

One gains at least two to three times more experience grabbing the tiger by the tail than reading about it in a book.

Education is cheap; experience is expensive.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

Knowing how to swim doesn't come from someone else showing you or someone else telling you or watching movies of other people swimming. It comes from having been in the water, knowing how to move yourself through the water and not sink. And it's true of virtually everything in our lives: knowing comes from direct experience.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

There is only one way to learn. It's through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.

Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books ... I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

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

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.