“Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.”

“There is nothing you will regret more in your life — nothing — than not being present for your children”

“Psychological studies have recently shown that adversity can be a more powerful motivator than support. Successful people often remember being told that they could not do what they have, in fact, done brilliantly. Stubbornness drove them. Their parents or teachers have told them they will never make any money, or that they will never get a college degree, or that they will never marry and have children. The urge to prove authority wrong has often spurred human beings to unusual success.”

“Other people's children went off to college, which for years Ronald had interpreted as a positive thing. Lately, though, he wasn't so sure. The children who went off to college hardly ever came back. It was as though the hard work of getting that college degree bent them out of shape, focused them too much on their own personal achievement. Once you got that degree, it was all about getting ahead in that monetized struggle, and they forgot the community that raised them. Ooh, live in the Lower Nine; not me. Ooh, do a day's work with your hands; I won't touch that. The neighborhood gained something when one of its children went off to become a doctor or an engineer, but it lost something, too.”

“There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.”

“Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.”