The connectedness of things is what the great university is all about, and I believe the great university in the coming century will be described as a community of scholars.

Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.

A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130.

Research must continue to be the centerpiece of intellectual life, and our commitment to research must grow, because our problems are growing.

Education is a seamless web: one level of learning relates to every other.

To put it simply, school readiness means creating in this country a public love of children.

I am suggesting that quality in undergraduate education means giving students a perspective that is global.

Literature is an inquiry into the deepest yearnings of the human spirit.

Based upon the pictures, I concluded that about 60 percent of all college classes in the United States are held outside, underneath a tree, usually by a gently flowing stream.

An incompetent teacher is even worse than an incompetent surgeon because a surgeon can only cut up one person at a time.

As I watched my grandfather work with people who were impoverished, I began to understand that to be truly human, one must serve.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.

If you force me to pay a debt that is not mine, let me thank you in the afterlife

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

Life is movement. Once you stop moving, you're dead. Choose life.

Such an error, one finds, to do things for the best. They usually seem to be such unpleasant things.

From the moment we wake up each morning to the time we hit the pillow at night, we hear what people have to say, but are we really listening?

Power is gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.