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John Gardner Inspirational Quotes (72)

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True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.
John W. Gardner
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All of us celebrate our values in our behavior.
John W. Gardner
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One of the many interesting challenges nature presents us is its apparent disinterest in maintaining the order humans crave.
John Gardner
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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.
John W. Gardner
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I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words--changing nothing.
John Gardner
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
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The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.
John W. Gardner
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People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
John Gardner
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If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities, then every business office, government agency, golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.
John W. Gardner
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Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.
John Gardner
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At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.
John W. Gardner
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Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.
John W. Gardner
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The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.
John W. Gardner
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We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page we begin to see images.
John Gardner
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Find a pile of gold and sit on it.
John Gardner
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The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.
John W. Gardner
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The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.
John Gardner
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Creativity requires the freedom to consider unthinkable alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices.
John W. Gardner
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It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
John W. Gardner
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
John W. Gardner
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If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.
John W. Gardner
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The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
John W. Gardner
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To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.
John W. Gardner
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Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
John W. Gardner
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