Carl Davis > Carl's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“We encourage you: Take off the training wheels. Focus on true mental toughness. Focus on commitments and controllables, you can’t control the results anyway. Love people. Serve people. Provide value. Burn your goals. Fall in love with the process of becoming great.”
― Joshua Medcalf, Burn Your Goals: The Counter Cultural Approach to Achieving Your Greatest Potential

“Even choosing to do nothing is still making a choice.”
― Joshua Medcalf, Burn Your Goals: The Counter Cultural Approach to Achieving your Greatest Potential

“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything's possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.”
― Marie Lu, Legend

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
― Thomas Paine, A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal on the Affairs of North America

“What I care about is that kids are inspired to be better people because of their experiences in my school.”
― George Couros, The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

“Consider how much deeper learning could be if “creation” was a non-negotiable in the learning for both us and our students.”
― George Couros, The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

“If we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they are not good enough but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve.—Dylan Wiliam”
― George Couros, The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity

“If originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.”
― Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

“Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong.”
― Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

“why should we settle for unimaginative goals (as we find in so many early education settings) like being able to identify triangles and squares, or recalling the names of colors and seasons? Recognizing visual symbols is something a dog can do. Surely we can aim higher than those picayune objectives and demand preschool classrooms based on a more advanced understanding of developmental processes, an understanding that is bounded only by the limits of a young child’s growing brain, not by a superintendent’s checklist of what needs to be covered before June rolls around.”
― Erika Christakis, The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need from Grownups

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, The Living

“The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.”
― St Augustine

“The better you know yourself, the better your relationship with the rest of the world.”
― Toni Collette