For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

Common Core is a big win for education.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Alas! You complain that your soul is out of tune. Then ask the Master to tune the heart-strings.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough in me to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

I mean, I went to a Catholic boys‘ school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

You fail only if you stop writing.

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

I’m never going to be fast, and nobody will ever mistake me for being fast.

Every person above the ordinary has a certain mission that they are called to fulfill.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I can handle pain.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others‘ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

God made you a masterpiece – be blessed, secure, disciplined and equipped.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.