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I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
--
Collected Poems (1938) New Poems 22

 

E. E. Cummings

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Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

 

Robert Fulghum

 

How can anyone believe that you can "learn" how to feel and learn how to express it? How can anyone teach another person how to laugh and how to cry? How to be cheerful and how to be sad? Teach them what pain is, and despair, and desire, and passion? Hate and love? How can anyone waste their own and somebody else's time with that idiocy? But far worse than the morons who think they can learn these things are the people who claim they can teach them. In the end, they teach bad manners. If one of their trained poodles sits down in public, he doesn't sit, he slouches - which is supposed to mean that his behavior is "natural." He or she scratches his or her head then picks his or her nose, which is supposed to mean that he or she has no complexes and acts very spontaneously. So this is what New York talk shows look like.

 

Klaus Kinski

 

Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become 'stage-worthy.' We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking and crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. 'Talent' or 'lack of talent' have little to do with it.

 

Viola Spolin

 

A thousand Marys lured me,
To feathered beds and fields of glover,
Bird with crooked wing cast,
Its wicked shadow over,
A bauble moon did mock,
And trinket stars did smile,
Your funeral, my trial.

 

Nick Cave

 

Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses?
How soft is this one, how subtle this is,
How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is,
As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice;
How this one clings and how that uncloses
From bud to flower in the way of roses.

 

Arthur Symons