Based upon the pictures, I concluded that about 60 percent of all college classes in the United States are held outside, underneath a tree, usually by a gently flowing stream.

Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.

A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130.

Research must continue to be the centerpiece of intellectual life, and our commitment to research must grow, because our problems are growing.

Education is a seamless web: one level of learning relates to every other.

The connectedness of things is what the great university is all about, and I believe the great university in the coming century will be described as a community of scholars.

To put it simply, school readiness means creating in this country a public love of children.

I am suggesting that quality in undergraduate education means giving students a perspective that is global.

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

An incompetent teacher is even worse than an incompetent surgeon because a surgeon can only cut up one person at a time.

As I watched my grandfather work with people who were impoverished, I began to understand that to be truly human, one must serve.

Let us not be bored

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

I can't help you. Not really. I can only show up with a bright heart and hope that I get you at the right micro-moment with the perfect dose of light that helps you see what you already know.

They say talk is cheap. Maybe so. But kindness is even better—it's free! Free to give. Free to receive. Makes you wonder why there's not more of it, huh?

How do you create jobs? Our companies have generated about 350,000 jobs and that's good.

Success demands paranoia.

Whether you're going through fear, whether you're going through pain, or whether you're going through anything, love is the best healer and the most powerful thing in the world.

How do you be a 45-year-old man in a rock band, do it well, keep your dignity and not become a parody of yourself? I don't think it will be simple.

Optimism is a seed sown in the soil of faith; pessimism is a seed hoarded in the vault of doubt.