Hy Gardner Quotes

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

I was lazy. I would have been a hell of a lot better actress had I taken it more seriously. I never had the proper respect for acting. Quite often, I learned my lines on the way to the studio.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like.

God knows I've got so many frailties myself, I ought to be able to understand and forgive them in others. But I don't.

Life may not be perfect, at least it offered moments that were perfect enough.

Always, always pursue happiness.

A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.

Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

I was never an actress -- none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.

Every day that goes by and we don't win a ballgame, that's a missed opportunity for us to battle back.

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them.

We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which we live.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

If you have a dream, you've got to protect it.

(The movie) is the story of my life, but it's not about me. It's about anybody who ever dreamed big and had someone tell them, 'No, you can't do it.' You can.

They say golf is like life, but don't believe them. It's more complicated than that.

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

If you like the story then don't hold back in telling me about it, and if you don't then please keep your opinions to yourself!

The reason men don't know the law of life is because they're afraid to look Eternity in the face.

I hate cheating. I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.

Having a perilous adventure is always better than comatose safety. Always, always, always, always, always.

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

As a conductor I find the hardest tasks are to listen to the instinct of a musician and to hear the music behind the notes.

One must exploit the asynchronies that have befallen one, link them to a promising issue or domain, reframe frustrations as opportunities, and, above all, persevere.

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

The world loves talent but pays off on character.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

My secret vice is Sudoku puzzles. Can't stop playing them. My parents are accountants. I blame them entirely.

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud.

I was late once and it cost me $50,000. I figure it was cheaper to wear two watches.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.

I don't think that it is necessary to rethink curricular goals. But it is certainly worth thinking about whether these goals can be reached in multiple ways.

It wasn’t that strangers couldn’t hurt you. It was simply that the people you loved could do it so much better.

I think that any important educational goal can be realized via several routes.

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.

Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged.

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

In high school, I didn't get the chance to wrestle varsity until my senior year because I had an older brother who was better than me.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.

To ask "Where in your brain is intelligence?" is like asking "Where is the voice in the radio?"

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.