“As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.”

You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

What we reliably find is that people’s perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.

There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.

One of the challenges of commencement speeches is that you have this older, wiser person who is accomplished talking to young, not-yet-so-wise, not-yet-accomplished adults or, in high school or middle school, even younger.

Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.

I think it’s very important to send the message that, while parents are needed to remind you to practice and occasionally force you to finish things… they also need to learn to respect you. You as an individual, ultimately, are the captain of where you’re going.

The most important thing parents can do, although it’s not the only thing they should do, is model the behavior they want from their kids.

It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.

I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.

Lastly, the star became like Saturn, and there will finally come a time of want, death, imprisonment and all sorts of sad things.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won’t be American; it will be universal.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man’s interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

Man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Excellence has become a habit.

A person always doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.