Dan Simmons Quotes

The best university is the university of life.

I have a formal education, but there's a whole lot you don't learn in school. And you only have so much time to figure it out. No matter how cerebral, celestial, how ethnic, there's a span of time here.

The real answers aren't in textbooks; they can be found through experiences.

Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

Wisdom is not to be obtained from textbooks, but must be coined out of human experience in the flame of life.

I've experienced a lot for someone my age that a lot of people will be able to relate to.

In life, we all learn from everyone.

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.

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.

I thought I was an old soul, and that I knew life, but then starting the real life, I figured I am completely new.

I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.

I think what my father appreciated was the science experiment of life. He had these kids, and they had their own experiences. He wanted us to discover the world for ourselves.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

I'm not a prophet. I'm not a teacher. I have no degrees. My degree is from the University of Life.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.

As I go through life, I can see why my mother directed me that way, or why my father counseled me in that way. But some things you're open to when you're young, and some things you need to find out for yourself. I think that that's pretty universal.

I have been blessed to have had many excellent teachers. The further I get away from school, though, the more I realize that the greatest teachers in my life have come from outside of academia.

I might have lived long enough to learn all this in the long haul, but I would have been just another soul taking up time and space for a long spell before I learned.

Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

Whether it's in the right way or sometimes the wrong way, you learn about life and its lessons.

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.