I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students.

That's the beauty of art--we strive for perfection but never achieve it. The journey is everything.

The reason I love teaching, it's like being a miner. I find all these undiscovered jewels and, with the right motivation, they're amazed at what they can do. I have to show them their capability.

I want my students to love to read. Reading is not a subject. Reading is a foundation of life, an activity that people who are engaged with the world do all the time

It’s not the job of the teacher to save a child’s soul; it is the teacher’s job to provide an opportunity for the child to save his own soul.

I don't think we expect enough of students. They just need someone to show them the way.

Teach like your hair's on fire!

I want my kids to know that they're just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is they will become ordinary.

Good teachers are an endangered species because they're giving up because of the tests and everything.

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.

Baseball is a religion in my classroom. It's a very important part of life, baseball.

Alexier found that a dose of humility did wonders to one’s ability to grasp new ideas and, after all, it had been this very ability that made him the researcher he was today.

A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.

I could help you, ” I said. “Counseling, drugs, a religious advisor, a girlfriend.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.

Actually they [ Netflix] were telling us to push it further and I've never gotten a nod like that from anybody in the industry, so it's been awesome to work with them. I'm very happy where we're at.

I certainly have had experiences of a sense of wonder at the world and a feeling that even though it could all be explained rationally, it still feels that there is more to it.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

The denial of racism is a form of racism itself.

self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.