Quotes About Lessons

Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.

A woman has to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

No one is entirely useless. Even the worst of us can serve as horrible examples.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

History is a stern judge.

He neither drank, smoked, nor rode a bicycle. Living frugally, saving his money, he died early, surrounded by greedy relatives. It was a great lesson to me.

Experience is the name men give to their follies or their sorrows.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

There is no reason to repeat bad history.

Forget your mistakes, but remember what they taught you.

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.

The best things in life are appreciated most after they have been lost.

The great difference between voyages rests not in ships but in the people you meet on them.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

Teaching was the best way to learn.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

When the historian, Charles A. Beard was asked about the lessons from history, he said there were four: 1. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 2. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. 3. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. 4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

History is littered with leaders and movements, now long vanished and mostly forgotten, who failed to get to the deep truths of how and why their defeat happened.

Nothing is more difficult than trying to correct history.

I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many. After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it's time to really look at the future and not at the past.

I never took any guitar lessons or anything; I never really learned to play covers. I'm actually happy that I never took lessons as a kid. Now, I'd like to take lessons to kind of go deeper. But I think sometimes lessons can steal a person's personality away, because they're trying to do things so technically.