“Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.”

Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?

I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.

Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.

Some people prefer a world where we’re all equally talented in everything. Whether you prefer that world or not, I don’t think that world exists.

I don’t think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.

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.

When a woman comes to her class, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can.

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.

Maturity – among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.