“Autodidacts tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor’s most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your “deepest ingrained presuppositions,” as my own mentor, Karl Kroeber, once wrote,… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.” — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them. — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
Don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control.… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.” — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty. — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“...Novels--which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices.” — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“By the time they finish high school—after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents’… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“Getting A’s no longer means that everything’s okay, assuming that it ever did. “We have students, who, no matter what else is going on… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
“We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and… — William Deresiewicz Copy Share Image
![“[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.” quote by William Deresiewicz](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/2bb/william-deresiewicz-15471_austen_jane-austen-was-not-a-novelist-for-nothi_62623.jpg)
