Robert Grudin Quotes

True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.

The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.

The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.

In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future.

Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.

Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.

The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.

The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.

Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.

No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give.

The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.

Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one's teeth.

Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.

Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection.

The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.