"Self-taught" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and secondary teachers have undergone training for their life work, as investigators have, by a different regimen, of course, for theirs. But if college and university teachers do their work well, it is because they are born with competence for their calling, or were self-taught, or happened to grow into competence accidentally, as a by-product of training for other and partly alien ends, or learned ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... development had given fresh life to the whole society without obliterating its distinctive peculiarities. Song and ballad and local legends were still alive, and not merely objects of literary curiosity. It was under such conditions that Burns appeared, the greatest beyond compare of all the self-taught poets. Now there can be no explanation whatever of the occurrence of a man of genius at a given time and place. For anything we can say, Burns was an accident; but given the genius, his relation was clear, and the genius ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... there long, was quite young, not much older than Jerome, and had a keen, thin face, with nervous red spots coming and going in his cheeks, and fiery, deep-set eyes. He had the reputation of being very smart and energetic, and having considerable self-taught book-knowledge. He had a wife and two babies, and was, if the truth were told, staying away from home that day that his wife, who was a delicate, anxious young thing, might think he was at work. He had eaten ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... map, cashed a draft, and waited for the next steamer. While marking time he purchased copies of "French Self-Taught" and "Italian Self-Taught," hoping to school himself in a speaking knowledge of these two tongues. But the effort was futile. Pore as he might over those small volumes, he could glean nothing from their laboriously pondered pages. His mind was no longer receptive. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... that I could have learned without a teacher, but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who imagine that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of "Faust" in the work of Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... opponent of Calvin, pioneer defender of freedom of thought, and exponent of inward and spiritual religion of the type of the German Spiritual Reformers,[6] and it is unmistakable that we have, in this Dutch self-taught scholar, a virile interpreter of this same type of Christianity, marked with his own peculiar variation, and penetrated with the living convictions of his personal faith and first-hand experience. While putting emphasis on personal experience and on inward insight he ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... its capricious appetites, its unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly prophetic eyes very doubtful, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... commenced with a hymn. An orphan boy, fourteen years of age, a self-taught musician, placed himself before a small organ, provided by Mr. Winfield, and played the evening hymn. All the boys accompanied him with their voices, and sang very creditably; after this they were formed ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... collieries at Worsley whose value depended on their finding a market at the neighbouring town of Manchester; and it was to bring his coal to this market that he resolved to drive a canal from the mine to the river Irwell. With singular good luck he found the means of carrying out his design in a self-taught mechanic, James Brindley. But in Brindley's mind the scheme widened far beyond the plans of the duke. Canals, as he conceived them, were no longer to serve as mere adjuncts to rivers; on the contrary, "rivers ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... perennial freshness and charm. (2) The precision and clarity with which his ideas are presented. These qualities were due to his well-balanced and logical intellect that impressed everyone with whom he came in contact. His style, moreover, was the result of indefatigable labor, for he was largely self-taught. If the balance of his phrases and the general symmetry of his style seem to our modern taste a bit excessive, we must remember that he was a pioneer and could run no risks in the way of non-acceptance ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... learned Traveller came there who had gained renown at college, Whose abstruse research had won him even European fame, Questioned Philip, praised his genius, marvelled at his self-taught knowledge, Could she murmur if he called him up to ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... gods and men is sacred song. Self-taught I sing; by Heaven, and Heaven alone, The genuine seeds of poesy are sown. 1766 POPE: Odyssey, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Latin, German, and Dutch. He read much and widely, and learned a great deal, though without method. Like Ivan the Terrible, he was a self-taught man. He afterward complained of not having been instructed according to rule. This was perhaps a good thing. His education, like that of Ivan IV, was neglected, but at least he was not subjected to the enervating ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... sons of the better classes are prepared, by instruction in German, &c., for a further course of study in the Gymnasium of Belgrade, the germ of a future university. A proof of the taste now spreading for general literature was afforded by the library of the Archpriest, "Jowan Paulovich, a self-taught ecclesiastic: the room in which he received us was filled with books, mostly Servian, but among them I perceived German translations of Shakspeare, Young's Night Thoughts, and a novel of Bulwer's." The son of this priest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... here lives a very remarkable man, a self-taught artist of considerable power, who has never been out of the Island, consequently has but rarely seen a picture, and yet his artistic instincts and power of representation are of no mean order; and more especially displayed in his altar pieces. I wonder ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... chiefly self-taught, except in music, was a well- educated woman, and a most conscientious teacher—had been caused a world of trouble in undoing what her predecessor had done; and in the few times that the little Fergusons had met in the street their former ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... a pretty large circle this evening. Dr. Johnson was in very good humour, lively, and ready to talk upon all subjects. Mr. Fergusson, the self-taught philosopher, told him of a new-invented machine which went without horses: a man who sat in it turned a handle, which worked a spring that drove it forward. 'Then, Sir, (said Johnson,) what is gained is, the man ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... cottage, with many useful and curious instruments; some ideas remain of the education of his two first years; some arts are borrowed from the beavers of a neighbouring lake; some truths are revealed in supernatural visions. With these helps, and his own industry, Automathes becomes a self-taught though speechless philosopher, who had investigated with success his own mind, the natural world, the abstract sciences, and the great principles of morality and religion. The author is not entitled to the merit of invention, since he has blended the English ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... arrived he looked up also, and seeing Sidonia, exclaimed, with surprise, "Beautiful Sidonia, how have you learned the lute?" At which she blushed and answered modestly, "Gracious Prince, I am only self-taught. No one here understands the lute except ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... to accomplish great things in the acquisition of knowledge. Thus he described the case of a Labourer on the turnpike road, who had become an able Greek scholar; of a Fifer, and a Private Soldier, in a regiment of militia, both self-taught mathematicians, one of whom became a successful schoolmaster, the other a lecturer on natural philosophy; of a journeyman Tin-plate worker, who invented rules for the solution of cubic equations; of a country Sexton, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... to admire. If the public buildings fail in this respect, the private houses have at least the advantage over them, that for the most part they do not pretend to any architecture at all. Many of the architects are self-taught, and have served little or no apprenticeship to the profession. Indeed, it should rather be called a trade, since they often are merely successful builders, who have taken to planning and superintending the erection of ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... old building of the same name taken down in 1835, from which were transferred the clock and bells of the Dungeon steeple. A niche in front is filled by a statue of the Scottish hero by James Thorn (1802-1850), a self-taught sculptor. There are statues of Burns, the 13th earl of Eglinton, General Smith Neill and Sir William Wallace. The Carnegie free library was established in 1893. The charitable institutions include the county hospital, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... there is another, and more human, source of interest about the animal who is writhing feebly in the glass jar of salt water; for he is one of the many curiosities which have been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr. Charles Peach, the self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we walk on toward the rocks, something should be said, or rather read; for Mr. Chambers, in an often-quoted passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must have the pleasure ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... every day; and the foresight of deeds which should draw the eyes of men upon him, which should shout his name abroad, softened his judgments with the charity of satisfied ambition. He would be the glorified representative of his class. He would show the world how a self-taught working man conceived the duties and privileges of wealth. He would shame those dunder-headed, callous-hearted aristocrats, those ravening bourgeois. Opportunity—what else had he wanted? No longer would his voice be lost in petty lecture-halls, answered only by ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... one of the greatest masters of etiquette who ever bore the most exalted honor that can be awarded by the people of the United States? Washington was completely a gentleman—and so was Abraham Lincoln. Because Lincoln's etiquette was self-taught it was no less masterly for that! Whether he happened to know a lot of trifling details of pseudo etiquette matters not in the least. Awkward he may have been, but the essence of him was courtesy—unfailing courtesy. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Palatinate. But when Watson, Balfour, and other British officers, professing to know the laws of war and nations, burnt houses and hanged those citizens who had taken deceptive paroles upon their authority, certainly it may be affirmed that Marion, who was self-taught, and had no book of the law of nations, or perhaps any other book in his camp, was justifiable as a matter of retaliation, to shoot down their pickets and cut off their sentinels wherever he could find them; and always to fight such invaders in their own barbarian manner. Nothing ever showed, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... questions, and hearing always something new from the amazing stores of nature knowledge that Henry Hill had acquired. This Norfolk worthy appears to have been possessed of a genius for many things. He was well versed in herbal lore, a self-taught 'cellist, playing each Sunday in the Congregational Chapel at Mattishall, and an equally self-taught watch-repairer; but his chief claim to fame was as a bee-keeper, local tradition crediting him with being the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... think it hopeless to make children their own teachers. If, however, they will consider that the all-important knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early years is got without help—if they will remember that the child is self-taught in the use of its mother tongue—if they will estimate the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom, which every boy gathers for himself—if they will mark the unusual intelligence of the uncared-for ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... uncommonly endowed him for the reception of those instructions. Of such means of improvement Master Payne was wholly destitute, for there was not a man that we could hear of in America who was at once capable and willing to instruct him. Self-dependent and self-taught as he must be, we could see no feasible means by which he could evolve his powers, be they what they might, to adequate effect for the stage. We deemed it scarcely possible that he could have got rid of the innumerable provincialisms which must cling to his youth: and we laid our account at the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... other, with the working of marble. There are also villages among the caves, where the workmen live. It contains a beautiful little Theatre, newly built; and it is an interesting custom there, to form the chorus of labourers in the marble quarries, who are self-taught and sing by ear. I heard them in a comic opera, and in an act of 'Norma;' and they acquitted themselves very well; unlike the common people of Italy generally, who (with some exceptions among the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of tune, and have ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... of the work on the ship herself. Chief Engineer Vibart, with a gang of half-taught, self-taught and untaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing out all the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship inside planetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engines so that they could be swung into line with the drive engines. ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... side now rode Uncle Jason, the man of diverse parts who was justice of the peace, adviser in dissension, and self-taught practitioner of medicine. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... have perseverance," responded Albert encouragingly, "and the pictures you have shown me seem very life-like. I wish I could do as well. You have done good work for one self-taught as you are, and you have no reason to ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... assembly, and ranked this among the dullest days he bad ever spent. This rural excursion had a very great affinity to those practised in our province, with this difference only, that we have no objection to the sportive dance, though conducted by the rough accents of some self-taught African fiddler. We returned as happy as we went; and the brightness of the moon kindly lengthened a day which had past, like other agreeable ones, with ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... seafaring life began, for from then on his doings are quite clearly known; so we must admit that while he may have had some teaching in childhood, what little knowledge he possessed of geography and science were self-taught in later years. The belief in a sphere-world was already very ancient, but people who accepted it were generally pronounced either mad or wicked. Long before, in the Greek and Roman days, certain teachers had believed it without being called mad or wicked. As far back ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... withers of a mountain in East Tennessee. As a child he had been taken by his parents to one of the states which are called pivotal states. There he had grown up—farm boy first, teacher of a district school, self-taught lawyer, county attorney, state legislator, governor, congressman for five terms, a floor leader of his party—so that by ancestry and environment, by the ethics of political expediency and political geography, by his own record and by the traditions of the time, he was formed to ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... intercommunication, flowing east and west, churned by countless paddle-wheels, as they force a vast freight of wealth, material, social, intellectual, to and fro, a freshet of fertilizing life to swell every stream. We love to repeat the names which self-taught men have hewn out in rude places, with the only advantage of being members of Mankind, holding their own share in the great heart and soul of it, and making that itself more illustrious than lineage and fortune. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Little Lucie whispered to me that they were going to have a parlour carpet if they got ninety cents for their wheat. Leo, with a good deal of fussing, got out his violin. It was old Mr. Shimerda's instrument, which Antonia had always kept, and it was too big for him. But he played very well for a self-taught boy. Poor Yulka's efforts were not so successful. While they were playing, little Nina got up from her corner, came out into the middle of the floor, and began to do a pretty little dance on the boards with her bare ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... was a self-taught painter. He had been tossed about the world in a variety of characters—errand-boy, brickmakers' boy, potter, shipwright, sailor, sawyer, strolling player; and here he finally settled down as painter, and, having achieved a trade, he turned author, and wrote his life. That life—The ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... sits Leonard, the self-taught, in the little cottage alone; for, though scarcely past the hour in which great folks dine, it is the hour in which small folks go to bed, and Mrs. Fairfield has retired to rest, while Leonard has settled to his books. He had placed his table under the lattice, and from time to time ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... in St. Louis, May 4, 1855, and music has been his livelihood. He is largely self-taught, and has composed some fifty pieces for the piano, a hundred and fifty songs, a few works for violin, viola, and 'cello, and two ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for he had been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... an argument against those who would affirm, if Van Eyck had discovered a vehicle, it would have been universally known. Such secrets are slow in progress, independent of the caution to keep them so. Artists did not formerly spring up self-taught; they were bound to masters, and learned their art from the beginning, and slowly, and learned not many of their secrets till after years of servitude, for such we must call it. They had then to make as well as to grind their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... self-taught poet, boasts of his inventions; among other singularities, one has at least the merit of la difficulte vaincue. He asserts this novelty to be entirely his own; the last word of every verse forms the first word of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... professional integrity. He was a great favorite among the young engineers and students; not a few of them yet remaining in Kings and Queens counties, and New York city, will remember "Jeff," with old-time good-will and affection. He was mostly self-taught, and was ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of hearing George Dyer read out one book of "The Farmer's Boy." I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is originality in it (which, in your self-taught geniuses, is a most rare quality, they generally getting hold of some bad models in a scarcity of books, and forming their taste on them), but no ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... world's peace and rest! Still only ambitious of fair-won renown, And olives with laurels to wreath in his crown. Say poet, philosopher, critick, divine, What art thou?—Since all, but omniscience is thine. Self-taught, tho' a king! and now destin'd to prove, That Minerva, like thee, sprang perfect from Jove. Like thee, fam'd for wisdom; like thee for alarms: The goddess of science, and goddess of arms! In his words, in his deeds, we read his great heart; Too gen'rous for fraud, and too wise ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... enough for the eager contention which the announcement of Government work to be done excites among us in these days. And of engravers there were but four between Maine and Georgia. Of these four, one was Paul Revere of the midnight ride, the Boston boy of Huguenot blood whose self-taught graver had celebrated the repeal of the Stamp Act, condemned to perpetual derision the rescinders of 1768, and told the story of the Boston Massacre,—who, when the first grand jury under the new organization was drawn, had met the judge with, "I refuse to sarve,"—a scientific ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... from an obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the divine mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing, and grayed out the channels, and at last paved ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the greatest modern astronomer, died at Slough in England. Herschel was born in 1738 at Hanover. He was a musician of rare skill and a self-taught mathematician of great ability. In 1757, he deserted the band of Hanoverian Guards in which he played the oboe, although a mere boy, and fled to England, where he taught music and achieved success as a violinist and organist. His studies ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... stood before the committee to prove what the public opinion of that day held to be impossible. The self-taught mechanic had to demonstrate the practicability of accomplishing that which the most distinguished engineers of the time regarded as impracticable. Clear though the subject was to himself, and familiar as he was with the powers ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... preservation of these songs have either entirely ceased, or are gradually decaying Whether they were originally the composition of minstrels, professing the joint arts of poetry and music; or whether they were the occasional effusions of some self-taught bard; is a question into which I do not here mean to enquire. But it is certain, that, till a very late period, the pipers, of whom there was one attached to each border town of note, and whose office was often hereditary, were the great ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the "Freeport dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a fox-hunter lays ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... round the old Church as before. Another great road was made at the same time—that which crosses Golden Common and leads ultimately to Portsmouth. It used to be called Cobbett's Road, because William Cobbett, a clever, self-taught man, had much to do with laying it out. Cobbett had a good many theories which he tried to put into practice, some sensible, others mistaken. The principal traces we see of him now are in the trees that he planted, chiefly introduced ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Preserver, and Governor of the universe at large, and every thing contained in it. It shows both the nature and tendency of the true knowledge of the Creator—that this is not learned in the schools, but that every man from his birth is self-taught it—Yet that the depravity of men is so great as to corrupt and extinguish this knowledge, partly by ignorance, partly by wickedness; so that it neither leads him to glorify God as he ought, nor conducts him to the attainment of happiness—And though this internal knowledge is assisted by ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... diligent study, Mary Anderson fulfilled a second engagement in New Orleans, which proved a great financial success. The criticisms of this period all admit her histrionic power, though some describe her efforts as at times raw and crude, faults hardly to be wondered at in a young girl mainly self-taught, and with barely a year's experience of ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... to matter if a man was poor and self-taught, but in these days of competition it's different. A boy must have chances if he's going to fight the battle on equal terms. Of course, some boys ain't worth botherin' about. But my boy—well, he seems to have something ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... battles, is the circumstance of his having taken, in both, the commanders of the enemy. Indeed, the war in general may be distinguished by the singular success of this gentleman and the celebrated lord Clive, two self-taught generals; who, by a series of shining actions, have demonstrated that uninstructed genius can, by its own internal light and efficacy, rival, if not eclipse, the acquired art of discipline and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... eagerness that showed a marked result at the spring elections. The interest of the working-men who heard these addresses was equaled, perhaps excelled, by the pleased surprise of college professors and men of letters when they found that the style and method of this self-taught popular Western orator would stand the test of ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... written out!" And this was after the obviously genuine appreciation of the paper given in Darwin's letters. Sir George King writes:— "He had taught himself a little Latin and a good deal of French, and he had read a good deal of English literature. He was certainly one of the most remarkable self-taught men I ever met, and I often regret that I did not see more of him...Scott's manner was shy and modest almost to being apologetic; and the condition of nervous tension in which he seemed to live was indicated by frequent ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... stated that her husband was an atheist, and had a most singular mole on his back, and that she had been called by telegraph to the care of an aunt taken down with measles and whose husband was a steamboat pilot, and an excellent self-taught banjoist; that she, herself, had in childhood been subject to membranous croup, which had been cured with pulsatilla, which the doctor had been told to prescribe, by his grandmother, in a dream; also that her father, deceased, was a ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... appalled, it seems, by the rough travelling. 'You can recommend some other fit person?' asked the Duke. 'No,' said Smeaton, 'I'm sorry I can't.' 'What!' cried the Duke, 'a profession with only one man in it! Pray, who taught you?' 'Why,' said Smeaton, 'I believe I may say I was self-taught, an't please your grace.' Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith's third marriage, was yet living; and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the instrument-maker's, the other was beginning to enter it by the way of his trade. The engineer of to- day is confronted ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do not say that they are wrong. The man who has taught himself is apt to be a vain, conceited fellow who takes pleasure in thinking for himself, and has an absolute delight in despising the thoughts of others. It is, however, no less the fact, that it is among these self-taught men that we find those vigorous spirits who venture boldly beyond the domain of human science and extend its frontier. The question then is which is best, to favour all these troublesome self-taught people in the hope of finding some good ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... instruction and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... strong. The solitary and absorbing passion of his life, a pure and honest love for that beautiful girl, surged in his soul, and his face betrayed the curb he was putting on himself. He had had but a poor upbringing, and his code of honour had been self-taught, but he was manly enough to be above making love ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... several works connected with geography and navigation. Besides a crew of about fifty, including marines and mechanics; he was accompanied by Mr. Smith, an eminent botanist, who likewise possessed some knowledge of geology; Mr. Cranck, a self-taught, but able zoologist; Mr. Tudor, a good comparative-anatomist; Mr. Lock-hart, a gardener from Kew; and Mr. Galwey, an intelligent person, who volunteered ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... bred to some handicraft: he afterwards contrived to learn Latin, and was for some time an usher in a school, till he became a tutor in a nobleman's family. The low-bred, self-taught man, the pedant, and the dependant on the great contribute to form the Editor of the Quarterly Review. He is admirably qualified for this situation, which he has held for some years, by a happy combination of defects, natural and acquired; and in the event of his death, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... shrugged his shoulders, and departed, knowing two things: first, that to move Drake was to move mountains; and next, that when the self-taught hero did bestir himself, he would do more work in an hour than any one else in a day. So he departed, followed hastily by most of the captains; and Drake said in a low voice ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... no school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees—are ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... except his clerk (appropriately yclept Inkpen), and when he couldn't it was handed back to Mr. Brodie for exposition, wherein if he himself failed, as was sometimes the case, he had to write a new Opinion. Inkpen was a character, as a self-taught entomologist, breeding in me then the rabies of collecting moths and beetles, as a couple of boxes full of such can still prove. He lived at Chelsea, near the Botanical Gardens there; and attributed his wonderful finds of strange insects in his own pocket-handkerchief garden to stray ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... metaphysicians that the West can boast, I cannot state. But this at least is clear; his interest in them was real and lasting. And in his conversation he showed keen appreciation of philosophical problems. It is to be noted also that he was a self-taught philosopher—for he had attended no school since he studied elementary English, ten years before, while a lad of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Sanscrit, and other tongues. In 1819 he wrote a letter to the Persian ambassador in that magnate's own language. After these linguistic contests, he early turned to mathematics, in which he was apparently self-taught; yet, in his seventeenth year he discovered an error in Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. He entered Trinity College where he won all kinds of distinctions, being famous not merely as a mathematician, but as a poet, a scholar, and a metaphysician. He was ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... head: he sees things through the medium of heat and passion, not with reference to any general principles, and his whole system of thinking is deranged by the first object that strikes his fancy or sours his temper education. He is a self-taught man, and has the faults as well as excellences of that class of persons in their most striking and glaring excess. It must be acknowledged that the editor of the Political Register (the twopenny trash, as it was called, till a bill passed the House to raise the price to sixpence) is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Leipzig, in 1646,—left fatherless at the age of six years,— by the care of a pious mother and competent guardians, young Leibnitz enjoyed such means of education as Germany afforded at that time, but declares himself, for the most part, self-taught [6]. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... name among his countrymen, by having one day seen by chance a beautiful enamelled cup, which had been brought from Italy. He was then struggling to support his family by his attempts in the art of painting, in which he was self-taught; and it immediately occurred to him that, if he could discover the secret of making these cups, his toils and difficulties would be at an end. From that moment his whole thoughts were directed to this object; and in one of his works ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... chart comparable in extent and accuracy to that of this barbarous Eskimo. The aptitude of the Eskimos to draw, is abundantly shown by the numerous illustrations in Rink's work, all of which were made by self-taught men, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... himself suddenly brought into contact with wealth and its accompaniments, and began to fear that more might be expected of him than he would be able to accomplish. The occasion must be urgent indeed, thought he nervously, which should induce wealthy people to have recourse to him—a poor, self-taught, obscure artist—merely because he happened to be the nearest at hand. However, to draw back was impossible; and, although grief is always repellent, there was still an amount of kindness and consideration in the demeanour of his new employer that reassured him. Besides, he knew that, let his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... acquaintance of Astier-Rehu—The mysterious ink—I defy the chemists of the Institute.' This brief epitome is enough to show the combination, the humpback's self-satisfaction plus the arrogance of the self-taught artisan. The general result of reading the production was utter amazement that the Permanent Secretary of the Academie Francaise and the official representatives of science and literature could have been taken in for two or three years by ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... that a self-taught small boy learns is what is called "dog fashioned." This name accurately describes the stroke, as it is in reality very similar to the motions by which a dog swims. No amount of book instruction can teach a person to swim, ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... Mr. Soden Smith, shared my feelings with reference to the celestial loveliness of this figure. Which is best, to live in a country where such a work of art is taken for a horse-trough, or in a country where the products from the studio of a self-taught handicraftsman, equal to the shaping of a horse-trough and not much more, are put forward as works ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... contact. He, furthermore, was not only an artist who used oil, water-color and pastel with equal facility, and painted landscapes and figure pieces as well as marines, but was versatile in his talents. His musical instincts were marked, and, although self-taught, he played on a number of instruments, and he had also, through years of industrious reading and study, become thoroughly well-informed and an interesting conversationalist. He was of a most generous nature, and was ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... the principal ancient Buildings of the city of Exeter. 13th—Connected with the organ there is a Bird Organ, which plays when required. This unrivaled piece of mechanism was perfectly cleaned and repaired by W. Frost, of Exeter, a self-taught artist. Jacob Lovelace, the maker, ended his days in great poverty in Exeter, at the age of sixty years, having been thirty-four years in completing it. This museum also contains glass of the Roman period—A.D. 100-500. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... be corrected by Graham, and really writes them very well for one entirely self-taught. He and his wife are most generous people and are always sending us small presents. I shall have some quaint mats and little bags of skin made by the people ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... the simplest and most popular of the living national song-writers, Alexander Laing, was born at Brechin on the 14th May 1787. His father, James Laing, was an agricultural labourer. With the exception of two winters' schooling, he was wholly self-taught. Sent to tend cattle so early as his eighth year, he regularly carried books and writing-materials with him to the fields. His books were procured by the careful accumulation of the halfpence bestowed on him by the admirers of his juvenile tastes. In his sixteenth year, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... presumption is a part of the very essence of genius, in Warner it was doubly natural, for he was still in the heat and flush of a design, the defects of which he had not yet had the leisure to examine; and his talents, self-taught and self-modelled, had never received either the excitement of emulation or the chill of discouragement from the study of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the mahogany cupboard here were made for my father by a self-taught cabinet-maker—Glyeb Butyga, a serf of General Zhukov's. Yes... a great artist ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hero. His name is known throughout the whole world wherever books are read. He was born in the lowest condition of life, and raised himself to the highest point of fame. He was a self-taught man too. No large sums of money or long years of time were spent upon his schooling. No college education made him what he was. An old woman taught him his letters, but he was not sent to school till he was thirteen years of ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... of a self-taught man, without scientific or academic training, producing a work that marks an epoch in historical literature. With a wonderful memory, he had, like Macaulay, the gift of getting the meaning and value of a book by simply glancing over the pages. On an average he could ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... cloak, in some things sensitive and shamefaced as a girl; moody and self-involved, but never selfish, full of courage, and of keen insight into nature and men, and the principles of both, but simple as a child in the ways of the world; self-taught and self-directed, argumentative and scientific, as few men of culture have ever been, and yet with more imagination than either logic or knowledge; to the last as shy and blate as when working in the quarries at ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... but we lack the necessary funds. The little "Telephone," the organ of the W.C.T.U. of the Maritime Provinces, which has recently made its appearance, is a credit to that society, as well as to its editor and publisher, Mrs. Cowil, a woman self-taught in the art of printing, and full of faith and courage in their new enterprise. All over our land there are women ready with their pen, whose message has been long delayed, and whose thoughts we need. While, as yet, we have no paper ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... to say for the self-taught Englishman;—yet do not congratulate yourselves on his simplicity. I told you, a little while since, that the English nobles had left the history of birds to be written, and their spots to be drawn, by ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... rounds—Dr Craig, for example; or Mr Thomas Smibert; or Mr Adam Dickson, a young genius nipt in the bud—whose appearance would be the welcome signal for the 'tinkling' of Peter's hammer to know a brief respite. And I could mention others of his acquaintance, almost self-taught like himself, whose intelligence might enable ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... then, whate'er of the world's ancient store, 180 Whate'er of mimic Art's reflected scenes, With love and admiration thus inspire Attentive Fancy, her delighted sons In two illustrious orders comprehend, Self-taught: from him whose rustic toil the lark Cheers warbling, to the bard whose daring thoughts Range the full orb of being, still the form, Which Fancy worships, or sublime or fair, Her votaries proclaim. I see them dawn: I see the radiant visions where ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... the self-taught doctor, who was also the local Evangelist. Two neighbor women were there too, called from adjacent cabins to take the place of the daughter he had sent away. They were ignorant women, hollow-chested and wrinkled like witches because they had spent ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... deal with rogues.—To- day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about "strahps to your pahnts," which was vastly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of this price was taken out by the proprietress, Anna Markovna; the other, however, the musicians divided evenly. In this manner the pianist received only a quarter of the general earnings, which, of course, was unjust, since Isaiah Savvich played as one self-taught and was distinguished for having no more ear for music than a piece of wood. The pianist was constantly compelled to drag him on to new tunes, to correct and cover his mistakes with loud chords. The girls ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Like a self-taught fiddler at the concert of a master, Sylvia's failures had taught her the meaning of success. Although her inexperience kept her from making at all a close estimate of the literal cost of the toilet, her shrewdness made her divine ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned the eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and poetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a peasant bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singular mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... surprised delight such a performance emanating from such a source. Fifteen years previously, the French Academy had crowned a similar work; now its equal was produced by a youth of twenty, busily engaged in commercial pursuits, self-taught, and obliged to snatch from sleep the hours devoted to study. The paper was immediately sent to Von Zach for publication, with a note from Olbers explaining the circumstances of its author; and the name of Bessel became the common property of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... life, that cannot defend itself. Children soon learn to distinguish those children and animals, who can, and will, resent cruelty, from those who will not; and therefore, speculate on the results accordingly, and become self-taught up to this point. A child should never be without a kind and wise guide at this period; that which in itself descends to evil, for the want of a moral guide, may be turned to good. The faculties ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... it can do nothing for me; I mean morally, intellectually. I've had scores of people pass through my hands in the last fifteen years—Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, men of so-called high family, men of humble birth, men from a dozen universities, self-taught men, young men, old men, and, my God! what have I found? Arrogance, stupidity, ingratitude, loose thinking, conceit, ignorance, laziness, indifference; absence of tact, discretion, courtesy, manners, ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... the facts of the argument. Having quickly 'picked up the case,' the lawyer joined Sir Robert Peel's guests at breakfast, and amused them by leading the dean back to the dispute of the previous day, and overthrowing his fallacies by a skilful use of the same arguments which the self-taught engineer had employed with such ill effect. "What do you say, Mr. Stephenson?" asked Sir Robert Peel, enjoying the dean's discomfiture. "Why," returned George Stephenson, "I only say this, that of all the powers above and under earth, there seems to me no power ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Derbyshire lady who died at Matlock in 1854: "She undertakes any kind of manual labour, as holding the plough, driving the team, thatching the barn, using the flail; but her chief avocation is breaking horses at a guinea per week. She is fond of Pope and Shakespeare, is a self-taught and capable instrumentalist, and supports the bass viol ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... lift it with one hand; and yet the music they bring from it is surprising; one air after another, a little monotonously, but with great ease and a certain execution, and with the additional merit of being self-taught. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the poor peasant boy, John Clare; and how strikingly dissimilar it was in its most marked characteristics to the head of George Stevenson, one of the most original of mechanical geniuses. Both were self-taught, but one was intensely active, the other cogitative. The mind of Clare was constantly engaged in poetical musings upon the moral affections, their pains and their pleasures; that of Stevenson was drawn by an inherent ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... other lecturers. Mrs. Edna Cheney talked to us about art; though all that I recall of her conversation is the fact that she pronounced always olways, and I wondered if that was the regular Boston pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonist of Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of his disciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled the numbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great Harvard ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... whom he was always ready to share his own scanty means; an apparent disregard for money, except when employed in the purchase of books; an utter indifference to the ambition usually accompanying self-taught talent, whether to better the condition or to increase the repute: these, and other traits of the character portrayed in the novel, are, as far as I can rely on my information, faithful to ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... down and began to pound the keys, but soon she stopped and shook her head. She had never been an expert. Self-taught, her work had been laboured and slow, and the lapse of months had thrown her out. "However! Something must be done!" And the pounding went on for days and days, hour after hour; and when her fingers, wrists ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... languages or dialects, pales considerably before the almost contemporary Philological Grammar, based upon a comparison of over sixty tongues, by the Dorset poet William Barnes, who, like Borrow himself, was a self-taught man. To mention but two more English contemporaries of Borrow, there was Thomas Watts, of the British Museum, who could read nearly fifty languages, including Chinese; and Canon Cook, the editor of the Speaker's Commentary, who claimed acquaintance with fifty-four. It is commonly said ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... briskly. "I've got no lawyer, commissioner." His speech was the elaborated and painfully emphasized English of the self-taught East Sider. It carried in it just the bare suggestion of the racial lisp, and it made an acute contrast to the menacing Hibernian purr of Donohue's heavier voice. "I kind of thought I'd conduct my ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... United, and, I trust, in the Confederate States,* who believe that Catawba wine is better than the best Champagne. Opposite that famous old White House at Washington, whereof I shall ever have a grateful memory, they have set up an equestrian statue of General Jackson, by a self-taught American artist of no inconsiderable genius and skill. At an evening-party a member of Congress seized me in a corner of the room, and asked me if I did not think this was THE FINEST EQUESTRIAN STATUE IN THE WORLD? How was I to deal with this plain question, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trade in the fields in lonely communication with nature. We know too that Crome was a house-painter, and practised painting from nature when his daily work was done. Nevertheless he attained as perfect a technique as any painter that ever lived. Morland, too, was self-taught: he practised painting in the fields and farmyards and the country inns where he lived, oftentimes paying for board and lodging with a picture. Did his art suffer from want of education? Is there any one who believes that ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... intrepid Otis, who first struck out the spark of American independence; of that noble Adams, its most eloquent champion on the floor of Congress; of that martyr Warren, who laid down his life in its defense; of that self-taught Bowditch, who, without a guide, threaded the starry mazes of the heavens; of that Story, honored at home and abroad as one of the brightest luminaries of the law, and, by a felicity of which I believe there is no other example, admirably portrayed in marble by his son? What citizen of Boston, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... they gain'd, By pruner's axe yet unprofaned. High o'er the rest, by nature rear'd, The oak's majestic boughs appear'd; Beneath, a copse of various hue In barbarous luxuriance grew. 90 No knife had curb'd the rambling sprays, No hand had wove the implicit maze. The flowering thorn, self-taught to wind, The hazel's stubborn stem entwined, And bramble twigs were wreathed around, And rough furze crept along the ground. Here sheltering from the sons of murther, The hares their tired limbs drag no further. But, lo! the western wind ere long Was loud, and roar'd the woods ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... dimensions, on which sundry steaming pots were placed, and various joints of wild horse, bear, and venison roasted, and sent forth a savoury odour as well as a pleasant hissing noise. The inhabitants of the block-house were self-taught brewers, and the result of their recent labours now stood displayed in a row of goodly casks of beer—the only beverage with which the dwellers in these far-off regions ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Thomas Godfrey, a self-taught mathematician, great in his way, and afterward inventor of what is now called Hadley's Quadrant. But he knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion; as, like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected universal precision in everything said, or was forever ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... Jake were locked up in separate rooms, and sentries placed beneath their windows—this in addition to the security of hand-cuffs and roped arms. Then breakfast was prepared for the entire company, and those who had been wounded in the fight were attended to by Hunky Ben—a self-taught surgeon—with Mary and Buttercup to act ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... maintained, Who sleeps not, is not weary; in whose sight Slow-circling ages are as transient days; Whose work is without labour, whose designs No flaw deforms, no difficulty thwarts, And whose beneficence no charge exhausts. Him blind antiquity profaned, not served, With self-taught rites and under various names Female and male, Pomona, Pales, Pan, And Flora and Vertumnus; peopling earth With tutelary goddesses and gods That were not, and commending as they would To each some province, garden, field, or grove. But all ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Drogheda were ludicrously unavailing, and he had been forced to take his ragged rabble away without achieving anything. Regarded as an army it had one striking peculiarity—there was not a single military man in it! Sir Phelim himself had been bred to the law; Rory O'Moore was a self-taught insurgent who had never smelt powder. They had no arms, no officers, no discipline, no organization of any kind; what was more, the men were deserting in all directions. In the south there was no one ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... grasps it under difficulties rises in his own respect and in usefulness to the community, I have said, and I shall say, nothing. In the city of Manchester, in the county of Lancaster, both of them remarkable for self-taught men, that were superfluous indeed. For the same reason I rigidly abstain from putting together any of the shattered fragments of that poor clay image of a parrot, which was once always saying, without knowing why, or what it meant, that knowledge was a dangerous thing. I should as soon think of piecing ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... Girard nothing came by chance. He was a self-taught man, having but little education so far as books go; but in the great school of actual business he received a diploma, and to this was afterwards added several complimentary degrees earned after his graduation. He never ceased to be a progressive man. A large range of stores were for ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... regular-built, true-blue, Yankee ship-master. Though his short black curls are thickly sprinkled with gray, he has not yet seen forty years; but the winds and suns of every zone have left their indelible traces upon him. He is an intelligent, well-informed man, though self-taught, well versed in the science of trade, and is a very energetic and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... some accepted system of transliteration, carefully transcribe every word of Russian in my text-book into the Latin characters, and learn the elements of the language from my manuscript. A year or so ago I made a brief visit to Russia with a "Russian Self-Taught" in my pocket. Nothing sticks, nothing ever did stick of that self-taught Russian except the words that I learnt in Latin type. Those I remember as I remember all words, as groups of Latin letters. I learnt to count, for example, up to a hundred. The other ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... supposed to be, matters of course. One is distinguished by an appearance of marked attention to every one present; the other manifests an habitual air of abstraction and absence of mind. The one is not an upstart with all the self-important airs of the founder of his own fortune; nor the other a self-taught man, with the repulsive self-sufficiency which arises from an ignorance of what hundreds have known before him. We must excuse perhaps a little conscious family-pride in the one, and a little harmless pedantry in the other.—As there is a class of the first character which sinks into the mere gentleman, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to find the birthplace of the builder of the Menai Bridge and other great national works in so obscure a corner of the kingdom. Possibly it may already have struck the reader with surprise, that not only were all the early engineers self-taught in their profession, but they were brought up mostly in remote country places, far from the active life of great towns and cities. But genius is of no locality, and springs alike from the farmhouse, the peasant's hut, or the herd's shieling. Strange, indeed, it is that the men who have built our ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... a talent for genius. Your brains are in your feet, where a dancer's ought to be. You've been self-taught until you're almost ruined, but not quite. What you need is a trainer. I'll take you in hand and put you at the top of the profession. There's room there for the two of us. You may beat me," said the Master, casting upon him a cold, savage look combining so much rivalry, affection, justice, and human ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... into her hand one evening, with a strange shy pride that brought all the blood into his face, while he kissed her with impetuosity to smother her reproaches. She asked him how he had got so much money—so much! and then he told her how, self-taught, he had learned to cut out figures—dogs and landscapes—in coloured paper, which he had taken to the bazaars and stationers' shops, and there disposed of—for a mere trifle truly. 'For this kind of thing is not fashionable, mother, though I think the Queen likes them,' he said; 'and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... fiddler among the dwellers of the wilderness; and the polished daughters of the East never enjoyed themselves half so well, moving to the music of a full band, upon the elastic floor of their ornamented ball-room, as did the daughters of the emigrants, keeping time to a self-taught fiddler, on the bare earth or puncheon floor of the primitive log-cabin. The smile of the polished beauty is the wave of the lake, where the breeze plays gently over it, and her movement is the gentle stream which drains it; but the laugh ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... PERIOD in American art dates from 1825 to about 1878. During that time, something distinctly American began to appear in the landscape work of Doughty (1793-1856) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Both men were substantially self-taught, though Cole received some instruction from a portrait-painter named Stein. Cole during his life was famous for his Hudson River landscapes, and for two series of pictures called The Voyage of Life and The Course of Empire. The latter were really epic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke |
