Hy Gardner Quotes

The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the [nonprofit] sector is its relative freedom from constraints and its resulting pluralism.

In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.

I have a huge author crush on Stephen King. Have never met him. Would probably embarrass myself. But it would be worth it.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather.

You can be the hunter, or you can be the hunted.

Seeing you lights up my day, to hear your voice makes me smile all cheesy, to see you smile makes my heart all warm and fuzzy, when you say I love you makes my body weak.

Be ready to hit; get good pitches to hit.

I knew when I left to go to start my career, you don't want to get in front of a band and say, uh, give me "Stardust" without saying D-flat.

I did not want vocal groups. I was not interested in singing with a group because there's too much problem with groups in the first place.

Being from Texas, I didn't know anything about gangsters and people like that, I had no fear of people.

Most artists don't know a hit. You can say I want this one to be a hit but it never become that way. The public decides that for you.

But if you don’t take the necessary steps to make them happen, dreams are just mirages that mess with your head!

I hold one thing dearer than all else: my commitment to my son.

Well, I really don't want to be a high-powered corporate lawyer. I'm really passionate about painting.

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth, see my two front teeth!

Believe you can and you can. Believe you will and you will. See yourself achieving, and you will achieve.

You treat God like you treat any dangerous looney — keep him calm and stay on his good side.

Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.

We can enhance our intelligences, but I am never going to become Yo-Yo Ma, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, or Pele.

Education is at a turning point

I think that I am strongest in linguistic and musical intelligence, and I continue to work on my interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence.

Beauty reveals itself in the course of an experience with an object.

A continuing conversation with other persons, with cultural products, and with oneself, is a large part of what it means to be a human being, in our time and perhaps in all time.

I want to understand how best to create and preserve a form of higher education that we value but that is in jeopardy for many reasons.

While truth is ultimately convergent, beauty is ultimately divergent. No one can and no one should tell anyone else what that person should consider beautiful.

In the United States these days, 'diversity' is a big word and a buzzword.

In order for me to 'endorse' an intelligence, I need to carry out lots of research.

'Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.

The purpose of human life is the dissolution of the soul and the revelation of the Spirit.

If we cut open the bud of a beautiful rose in order to see how it is 'packed' and what it is going to look like, what sort of a bloom will we get?

The mind is acquired "human nature". The conscience is inherent "spiritual nature".

As the mind shrinks at the will of the initiate, thought flows in to fill the spaces so created.

To have knowledge and to know are two different things, and one is possible without the other.

Mind is the Soul speaking and Conscience is the Spirit speaking.

Forgiveness. It is beneficial to forgive but better not to condemn in the first place.

Far superior to the pleasures and rewards of the illusion that is Earthly life are the pleasure and rewards of the Reality.

Don't give - give up!

There is the joy that is one's state of the being and there is the joy that is one's state of mind. The first is permanent and the second is impermanent.

Enjoy the necessities of life but eschew the excesses.

We are all Spirit experiencing a process set up to facilitate its (each Spirit's) understanding of its true identity and, through that understanding, to revert to its pristine state.

That we do not comprehend or accept something does not invalidate its truth.

You don’t free yourself from duty by running away. That only increases the weight on your shoulders.

Ah, but I am more perceptive than most of the universe. Especially the parts of the universe that are vacuum.

I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.

Don't be a little paranoid; worry about everything, or let it all go.

That's the first rule of command; be consistent! You can be sadistic, you can be lazy, you can be stupid, but if you're consistent the crew will still let you sit in when they play dominoes.

Lawyers will always buckle under to something, whether its bribes, violence, court orders, or the weight of their own bullshit.