"Self-taught" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... characterizes these 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 experience. Sir William Johnston was not more serviceable to his country ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... 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 and arms felt like "two ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... is little 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 buildings, instead of erecting them themselves. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... from 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 what he would say ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... ostentation, suggest views or cautions, which might indeed be useful to the University Student generally, by a relation of some of my own endeavours to improve my own mind, and to increase my own knowledge in my early life. I am no great admirer of self-taught geniuses; to be self-taught is a misfortune, except in the case of those extraordinary minds, to whom the title of genius justly belongs; for in most cases, to be self-taught is to be badly grounded, to be slovenly finished, and to be ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... historian, to a 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 in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... lady beside him on the box. I am much pleased to find that the taste for four-in-hand driving is increasing of late, and am glad to say, some gentlemen drive very well. It is easy enough, to detect those who are self-taught from those who have received instruction from a professional man. Many think that driving can be acquired without teaching. I wonder if any gentleman would like to dance in a ball-room without first taking lessons; and yet some, do not hesitate to drive four horses—a feat ...
— Hints on Driving • C. S. Ward
... eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela picaresca—a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything at all about the 'art for art' theory—which is doubtful—he may well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma—Dans l'art il faut sa peau—as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under conditions that might have proved utterly demoralising ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... and I shall say, nothing. Of the certainty with which the man who 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 ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... greatness, and mentally determined that it would make no difference in my bearing." His drawings at first were very hard, but the point of humour was invariably good, and the Scottish "wut" equal to that of the best man who ever drew for the paper. He was a self-taught draughtsman, who learned by watching his younger brother, "whose artistic boots," says he, "I was not fit to black;" but he improved rapidly, and contributed in all two hundred and twenty-seven drawings, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... internal quiet, saw, for the last time, hostile armies set in battle array against each other. This year is memorable in the life of Frederic, as the date at which his noviciate in the art of war may be said to have terminated. There have been great captains whose precocious and self-taught military skill resembled intuition. Conde, Clive, and Napoleon are examples. But Frederic was not one of these brilliant portents. His proficiency in military science was simply the proficiency which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... Museum, 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 ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a self-taught rustic, with little early schooling, except what the shepherd-boy could draw from nature, he wrote from his own head and heart without the canons and the graces of the Schools. With something of the homely nature of Burns, and the Scottish romance ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... since the fathers or grandfathers of our most conspicuous social leaders were self-made and self-taught, and since our American society is composed of so many varied types of humanity, it is well for a young girl to come in contact with all classes while she is yet a child, that she may understand humanity as she is sure to encounter ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... university. The boy had been all his life, as we have said already, brought up by his aunts (at Varvara Petrovna's expense) in a remote province, nearly six hundred miles from Skvoreshniki. As for Andreev, he was nothing more or less than our local shopkeeper, a very eccentric fellow, a self-taught archaeologist who had a passion for collecting Russian antiquities and sometimes tried to outshine Stepan Trofimovitch in erudition and in the progressiveness of his opinions. This worthy shopkeeper, with a grey beard and silver-rimmed spectacles, still owed ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... self-sacrificing labors, as a self-taught Physician, as a Missionary and Pastor of a Church, and finally as Governor of the Colony, have inscribed his name indelibly on the page of history, not only as one of Nature's Noblemen, but as an eminent Philanthropist ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... inheritance of acquisition, been handed over to a special department, creates externally a beneficial composure which is very favorable to internal progress. We must distinguish from the professional the amateur and the self-taught man. The amateur busies himself with an art, a science, or a trade, without having gone through any strict training in it. As a rule, he dispenses with elementary thoroughness, and hastens towards ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... entertained. Your lordship therefore is to be presumed competently versed in the rudiments of ethics. You have read Grotius, Puffendorf, and Cumberland. For my part I never opened a volume of any one of them. I am self-taught. My science originates entirely in my unbounded penetration, and a sort of divine and supernatural afflatus. With all this your lordship knows I am a modest man. I have never presumed to entrench upon the province of others. Let the professors of ethics talk their nonsense. I will not interrupt ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... oil-paintings? Who needed those Flemish boors, those red and blue landscapes, which put forth some claims to a higher stage of art, but which really expressed the depths of its degradation? They did not appear the works of a self-taught child. In that case, in spite of the caricature of drawing, a sharp distinction would have manifested itself. But here were visible only simple dullness, steady-going incapacity, which stood, through self-will, in the ranks of art, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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 truth, which was that ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... heard a trio sung in parts by three young girls, with a correctness of ear and voice which would do credit to others than the self-taught Burmahs. Many little songs, amongst others that commencing "Tekien, Tekien," were composed and sung by the Burman fair in compliment to their new and welcome visiters, the white strangers; but these, of course, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... 'My first victim—For a red ribbon—The gingerbread fair—I make the 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 an ignorant dwarf with a brain crammed full of ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... its state of decay and dilapidation, and these may possibly have misled me very much; but, whatever may have been the age of these paintings, it is scarcely probable that they could have been executed by a self-taught savage. Their origin therefore I think must still ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... and shut the door. Cuningham pushed him a chair, and Watson offered him a cigarette, which he somewhat doubtfully accepted. His two hosts—men of the educated middle-class—divined at once that he was self-taught, and risen from the ranks. Both Cuningham and Watson were shabbily dressed; but it was an artistic and metropolitan shabbiness. Fenwick's country clothes were clumsy and unbecoming; and his manner seemed to fit him as awkwardly as his coat. The sympathy of both the older artists did ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... industrial 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, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... of the 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 depositaries of oral, and particularly of poetical, tradition. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... to make its pages interesting and instructive, 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 of our own, the best papers of our Provinces will ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... Psaltery, Dulcimer, and Shawm, Tanglang, Locofodeon, and Hugag, marched next. They reserved their efforts for special occasions, when they woke the echoes with strains of altogether unearthly music, composed for them expressly by Saufylur, the eminent self-taught ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Winchester and Southampton had been made, and many houses had followed it. The road that crosses Colden Common and leads to Portsmouth was also made about the same time, and was long called Cobbett's road, from that remarkable self-taught peasant reformer, William Cobbett, who took part in ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... arteries of 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
... short-sighted inhabitants thought so much; and hence their Magna Charta, as they were wont to call their book of "Dennis," was rather a mischief than a benefit. Their general feelings are characteristically described in the following lines from the pen of worthy Kitty Drew, the self-taught Forest poetess, in her poem on the Forest of Dean, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... in that style, will 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 London gamin, as shown in whatever directions ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... vulgar 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 ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... considered as the Creator, 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... exploits of flying men were the theme of all the world. By the 1st of November in the same year the Royal Aero Club had issued twenty-two certificates; that is to say, twenty-two pilots, some of them self-taught, and some trained in France, were licensed by the sole British authority as competent to handle a machine in the air. Eight years later, in November 1918, when the armistice put an end to the active operations of the war, the Royal Air Force was the largest and strongest of the air forces of ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... an officer of merit and varied services, who had published 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
... elevation he could safely cross the entire grass plot. Later he launched himself from the lower ridges of a hill 250 feet high, when he sailed to a distance of over 250 yards, and this time he writes enthusiastically of his self-taught accomplishment:— ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... 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 has his choice whether he will move himself alone, or himself and the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... will you have done with your gibes, Callias? Why, because you have yourself spent sums of money on Protagoras, (17) and Gorgias, and Prodicus, and a host of others, to learn wisdom, must you pour contempt on us poor fellows, who are but self-taught tinkers (18) in philosophy ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... His country's great father, in blessings most blest, Who loses his own for the 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 ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... gods and men is sacred song. Self-taught I sing; by Heaven, and Heaven alone, The genuine seeds of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... originally 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; ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... 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 of quoting once again, has told the story better ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of Inez, in L'Africaine. About this time I lost my kind instructor, who passed away. I then worked by myself until I was sixteen, when I began to study technic systematically. As you see, then, I am practically self-taught. It seems to me, if one has voice and intelligence, one can and should be one's own teacher. No one else can do as much for you as you can do for yourself. You can tell what the sensations are, what parts are relaxed and what parts are firm, better than any one else. ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... true 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 age. He remained only four years ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... violinist, was born in Bergen, Norway, on the 5th of February 1810. At first a pupil of the violinist Paulsen, and subsequently self-taught, he was intended for the church, but failed in his examinations in 1828 and became a musician, directing the philharmonic and dramatic societies at Bergen. In 1829 he went to Cassel, on a visit to Spohr, who gave him no encouragement. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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
... trusting to his memory alone, has produced a 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 ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... 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 London and ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... strong, Freedom's mother—wrath and song. Giant-stout, a youth self-taught, Soon a giant's work he wrought. Ever he, full of glee, Thought and wit and melody, Mighty, merry, made his ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... 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 ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing). Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature. "His plays," says Sir Walter Raleigh, "are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris of popular literature,—scraps and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs. ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... self-taught man, born in Leicester; bred a shoemaker; became a schoolmaster, a Methodist preacher, and then a journalist; converted to Chartism; was charged with sedition, and committed to prison for two years; wrote here ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... musical literature, and only a few folk-songs and orthodox liturgical chants and Greek-Catholic scales existed. Toward musical theory he seems to have been completely indifferent. Only one rule he recognized, and that was, "Art is a means of speech between man and man, and not an end." He was self-taught, and actually invented an art of music with each step of composition. And what he produced, though it was not great in bulk, was novel with a newness that is one of the miracles of music. Scarcely a phrase ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... 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 of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... of a maltster at Bucklyvie, Stirlingshire, where he was born in 1817. He attended a school in Glasgow, but was chiefly self-taught. In his youth he composed verses, and continued to produce respectable poetry. For a period he carried on business as a draper in Cowcaddens, Glasgow. Retiring from merchandise, he fixed his residence in the village of Govan. His death ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 a ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 4: The signs proposed by the master to the disciple are of things known in a general and confused manner; but not known in detail and distinctly. Therefore when anyone acquires knowledge by himself, he cannot be called self-taught, or be said to have his own master because perfect knowledge did not precede in him, such as is required ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... could be found in all America, who is so much of a simpleton as to cite among the qualifications of any man for a situation of trust and responsibility, that he had never been TAUGHT how to perform its duties. They are not guilty of the contradiction of elevating men BECAUSE they are self-taught, while they expend millions on schools. Doubtless they have, after a fashion of their own, demagogues and Caesars, but they are usually kept within moderate limits; and in rare instances, indeed, do either ever seriously trespass on the rights of the ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mr. Longstaffe's Annals and Characteristics of Darlington, that the spinning of flax by machinery was first begun by one John Kendrew, an ingenious self-taught mechanic of that town, who invented a machine for the purpose, for which he took out a patent in 1787. Mr. Marshall went over from Leeds to see his machine, and agreed to give him so much per spindle ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... it an insipid 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 ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... site of an 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... twinkled at Magdalen with the self-enjoying frankness of a naturally harmless man. Had his wife heard him? Magdalen looked over his shoulder to the corner of the room in which she was sitting behind him. No the self-taught student of cookery was absorbed in her subject. She had advanced her imaginary omelette to the critical stage at which the butter was to be thrown in—that vaguely-measured morsel of butter, the size of your thumb. Mrs. Wragge sat lost in contemplation of one of her own thumbs, and shook her head ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... says the celebrated American Farmer, in every age and in every country bad men: Men who either hold or expect to hold certain advantages by fitting examples of SERVILITY to their countrymen: Who train'd to the employment, or self-taught by a natural versatility of genius, serve as decoys for drawing the innocent and unwary into snares. It is not to be doubted but that such men will diligently bestir themselves on this and every like occasion, to spread the infection ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... Inn Fields, where nobody could read his handwriting 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 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... 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
... 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, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... in 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 ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... his legal training, 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 his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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
... strength, he was attended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, when Violet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on her new piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason to expect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... use 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 ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... 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 ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various |
