I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I didn’t get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Anyone can have a good day, but you have to be able to perform on a bad day.

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

I hardly went to school.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

Some people have a hard time getting rid of stuff. If that’s you, pray for God to give you the courage to get rid of things you don’t really need or things He wants you to give away. This will help keep your surroundings organized and clutter-free.

My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

People who pity themselves think, ‚Why would I try to do anything? I’ll just fail.‘

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Boot camp sucks – SEAL training sucks – but you know what? That’s what makes you good.

How should a man be capable of grooming his own horse, or of furbishing his own spear and helmet, if he allows himself to become unaccustomed to tending even his own person, which is his most treasured belonging?

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.

You can stroke people with words.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

I’m always disappointed when people don’t live up to their potential. I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them. But that, too, can change.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Me not finishing school – in my head, I still have this insecurity when I’m talking to someone educated.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

Teachers are expected to be teachers, psychiatrists, nurses, sociologists, psychologists, surrogate moms or dads, as the case may be.

Anything I do, I want to do it well.

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

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I teach children to be winners.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can’t even lift them.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Power is competence.

I’m selfish.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?