Elliott Erwitt Quotes

I wanted to make noise, not study theory.

In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.

We were taught instead of just reading about life we needed to go out and live it.

Learning is not watching a video, learning is taking action and seeing what happens.

Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.

A practical part of my teaching is to provide demonstrative, hands-on experiences.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

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.

Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training.

The darkroom is just the means to an end.

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

Had I not been a philosopher in deeds, I would have devoted myself to the study of words

The only way you learn is by doing. You learn through deed, so that's kind of my aspiration for the time being.

We learn to do by doing.

Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.

The most important method of education always has consisted of that in which the pupil was urged to actual performance.

A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.

I was lucky enough to go to college for four years. At what was supposedly a hippie school with no tests and no grades, blah blah blah, I wasn't learning that. I was taking photography classes. That stuff just wasn't talked about. It was like, "Does this picture have the right about of grey in it?" It wasn't even an art school. It was a state-run school.

A learned person will become noble only when he or she has put into real practice what has been learned, instead of mere words.

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

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare. A person who has had no opportunity to go to school can also learn warfare — he can learn through fighting in a war.

Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.

Students were taught by doing.

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

Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.